Customer Reviews

Aladdin's Problem (The Eridanos Library)

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This book is an absolute masterpiece. I rank it with the greatest short fiction of Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, Unamuno. It is the last novel of the writer whom the next century will regard as a monument of the twentieth--after all, he lived 102 years and was active all the while producing fictional and philosophical creations of unusual originality. He also kept a diary through the decades, and when he died at the beginning of 1998 one obituary called him "the chronicler of a century of horrors."

ALADDIN'S PROBLEM is a slim volume, exceptionally terse, cryptic and understated even by J�nger's standards. It begins with brief meditations on growing old and flowers almost imperceptibly into the story of a funeral assistant who, troubled by the emptiness of modern life and the power of the forces above us ("Aladdin's problem"), conceives one of the most fantastic ideas for permanence in human history. You will stop in amazement when you discover it. From this point on he moves into a mystical realm with the aid of a suddenly appearing guru.

Perhaps I've already told too much, but this book is written so precisely that you will savor every word and thrill at the author's world-conception as it builds. Jünger's art is so much his own that you quickly understand that you are dealing with a truly independent mind.

Marsilio Publishers is performing a great service for American culture by publishing English translations of J�nger's works. It is a project on the level of publishing Jorge Borges in English in the 1960's. Let us hope that they will do an edition of J�nger's astonishing anti-utopian novel,THE GLASS BEES, which has been long out of print in translation.

Ernst's Junger's "Aladdin's Problem" is a short, but brilliant, expose of the spiritual disease eating the West alive and a concise statement of the author's alleged solution.

The cultural critique takes hold beneath the guise of a short retrospective memoir written in the 1980's by an East German army officer who has defected to the West and who eventually makes a quiet career in the mortuary services industry. He does well at this, until one day inspiration strikes - he decides to revive the ancient practice of interring the dead in "cities" of their own. He searches for a site for his universal necropolis, and settles on Cappadocia (in Turkey). The project, called "Terrestria", becomes wildly successful. However, as it drags on, the narrator becomes increasingly ill, until events reach a climax with the mysterious appearence of a sage who will impart wisdom to him.

The meaning? Aladdin was a poor boy who gained great power. Or more accurately, he was a poor boy who gained a lamp with a demon in it that had great power and was bound to do his will. The underlying comparison between the Middle Eastern legend and the modern West is clear. The "Problem" alluded to in the title is that of technological nihilism. We Westerners, and by extention many other peoples around the globe, are in possession of technologies that put terrible forces at our command; Aladdin's problem - "What do I do with the demon whose might I barely control?" - is our problem. Whether Junger's solution was acceptable is more than I can right now say. But this book is as artful a diagnosis of the Western world's illness as you will find anywhere else.

Don't mistake me. I love Ernst Jünger. The depth and multifacity of his intellect, the sheer breadth of his life-experience, his tireless worth-ethic and his awe-inspiring gift for writing lyric prose are unrivaled anywhere, in any culture. Take the ten most interesting and talented people you know, combine them...and you have an honest tenth of the extraordinary man that Jünger was. War hero. Adventurer. Writer. Metaphysician. Botanist. Entomologist. "Godfather of Fascism." Enigma.

Having said that, this novel went almost entirely over my head, and I can't believe I'm the only one who is still rubbing his scalp over the experience. The story in a nutshell is this: the narrator, Frederich Baroh, is an East German soldier of noble blood who, having experienced the delights of communism firsthand, defects to the West at the first opportunity he gets. In Berlin the rather contemplative and brooding Baroh reconnects with an uncle in the mortuary business, marries, and realizing the impermenent and fluxuating nature of the modern world - which cannot even promise that those laid to rest will not have to be exhumed should their cemetaries get paved over in favor of a new highway - eventually founds a necropolis, a "city of the dead" called Terrestra. The promise of Terrestra is that the remains of the dead will never be disturbed, and will be tended to and cared for until the end of time. The concept becomes a huge hit, and Baroh very wealthy. However, he complains throughout the book of a "problem" which often manifests in physical symptoms of pain and discomfort, and which he never really identifies, but seems to be related to the idea of the modern world. The majority of the book is spent grappling with the half-identified "problem" and it ends without either unveiling the problem or offering a real solution.

Baroh's problem, insomuch as I grasp it, is related to the fact that the modern world lacks any foundation - "opinions preceed ideas" as he puts it, and its impermence leads to a longing for permenence (hence Terrestra) which is probably just an illusion, which in turn leads to more suffering...a vaguely Bhuddist idea. Also, that mankind has unleashed energies (like the genie in Aladdin's lamp) which he can barely control and which he doesn't fully understand ("Our lamp is made of uranium.") And finally, that the rise of technology (hand in hand with the decline of spirtualism) has left a void in the human heart. A telling passage, rather typical of Jünger's prose style: "People feel that pure power and the enjoyment of technology leave them unsatisfied. They miss what used to be angels and what angels gave them."

And yet, having read the book about three times, that's as close as I can get to its thesis. The novel opens strongly, and is especially brilliant when detailing the horrible atmosphere of fear, suspicion and paranoia that marked East Germany, but the closer E.J. himself gets to his point, the more the point recedes, obscured by long digressions and obscure references. Jünger's great strength as a writer is his ability to say something earth-shakingly profound or evocatively beautiful in a single sentence; his great weakness (in my opinion), is his tendency to pummel the reader with turgid metaphysical ramblings. Many passages had me feeling exhausted when I finished them, and others sent my mind wandering so that I turned the page without really reading a word. ALADDIN'S PROBLEM is only 126 pages, but it feels like 600. And when it abruptly ended, I said, out loud, "What the F---?"

So at the risk of being the only reviewer too stupid to get it, I have to say...I didn't quite get it. And yet, I'd have to recommend the book, because Jünger's special gift is passages that are deeply profound yet oddly lyrical, such as: "Exploitation is inevitable; without it no state, no society, indeed, no mosquito can exist. It has endured and tolerated for centuries, often barely noticed. It can become anonymous; one is no longer exploited by princes, but by ideas; slaves and masters exchange faces....The important thing is to assign evil to the past, to the unenlightened times, and in the present, to the enemy."

Truer words were never spoken. If only the rest of the book were as clear.

Anyone who reads Junger outside of Storm of Steel knows that the plot is not really all that important as opposed to what he has to say about life/philosophy/issues. I fully expected this with Aladdin's Problem, and, in fact, got what I expected for the first third of the book. However, I have to say, even for a Junger novel, the point was so buried in the midst of the layers of thinking, that I really lost what he intended to do. Too bad, as the beginning was really awesome...

"Aladdin's Problem" appeared in 1983 when Jünger was eighty-eight years old. After it, he would live fourteen more years and write four more books.

I have entitled this review a re-read because the novel demands to be read over and over again, to be savored and studied. Because, as soon as you complete the novel, which is relatively short, you realize the ending, which is oddly consistent and logical within the magic realism of the book, has undermined your initial understanding and requires a return to the first paragraph. You also quickly understand that the novel is constructed like a poem or a series of aphorisms that must be savored and pondered. Jünger, who admired Nietzsche, calling him Old Gunpowder Head and carrying "Thus Spake Zarathustra" through the trenches of the Western front, is the master of the aphorism. And just like Nietzsche (maybe because of Nietzsche), Jünger employs aphorisms to carry his meaning, his themes, his exquisite metaphors and images.

The narrative is standard Jünger. A young man, Freidrich Baroh (read baron), born in Poland, joins the army, climbs within its ranks, and then defects to the West, settling in Berlin, where he attends university to study advertising, statistics, computer technology, insurance and journalism. These studies complement the age and fit within the Titanic revolution which ultimately overcomes Baroh, just as it did Prometheus. We are to understand Baroh as a very modern man, an individual, like Prometheus, who ultimately favors mankind over the Titans. As an aside, the theme of titanism runs throughout Jünger's novels and it is important to understand it as theme; just as it is equally important to understand his concepts of the Anarch,Waldgänger and Arbeiter.

Once Baroh finishes university he finds work with his Uncle Fridolin, who owns and operates Pietas Funerals. As he informs us early in the novel, Baroh is a climber. Just as he climbed through the ranks in the army, he puts his very modern skills to work in the funeral business. It is at the point that the novel "slips," to modify Bruce Sterling's term and leads us through several logical steps into the fantastic. But as the business of death grows, becoming a world onto its self, Baroh becomes aware of his problem, the same problem that he alerted us to in the first paragraph when he says: "It is time I focused on my problem." His problem is one of meaning or, more precisely, a disconnection between modern life and meaning. On a Jungian level, Baroh spends his early life enhancing his career and dealing with the material. As he ages, death becomes a reality and he becomes interested in depth, in meaning. His building of the necropolis Terrestra is the exciting force (Jünger believes the ritualization of death is the beginning of culture); the moment he realizes that "man is alone" and that modern Titanic society has destroyed all of those institutions that once presented illusions of solace, madness descends upon Baroh and he becomes nihilistic. Soon, he is visited by a spirit, by Phares, the bearer of light, who instigates an inward journey toward meaning.

Ultimately, what is Baroh's problem? He says:"madness is only part of my problem . . . . .A loss of individuality may be an additional factor." Madness arises from a split between his dream world and reality, while his role in the modern Titanic (nuclear) society is the cause of his disconnectedness. To achieve individualization he must leave and become a Waldgänger, one who walks away, a Zarathustra.

"Aladdin's Problem" presents us with a poetic statement of the modern problem and proposes a method to achieve an individual solution. But it is not didactic. It a well-constructed novel that stands firmly on all four legs of fiction, while at the same time promulgating Jünger's philosophy and obsessions.