From Publishers Weekly
Set sometime in the future, after the world government has splintered into city-states, German novelist Junger's murky and digressive dystopian fantasy features Martin Venator, night steward of the Casbah of Eumeswil, citadel-stronghold of a tyrant known as "the Condor." Venator rationalizes his subservience to the dictator by thinking of himself as an "anarch," a man with no ties to state or society. Unlike the anarchist, dedicated to fighting authority, the anarch "plays his own game" within the framework of established rules. When not seeking sexual comfort with his pupil, Ingrid, or with waterfront whore Latifah, Venator uses a time machine to replay historical events and to conjure up 3-D images of famous anarchists. Meanwhile, Ingrid uses the device to research "the Goldfinch Plan," an alternative to Zionist nationalism by which various countries will lease or donate tiny territories that will allow the Jewish people to exist as a seafaring network. Junger (b. 1895) is perhaps best known for opposing the Nazi regime through his bestselling roman a clef, On the Marble Cliffs (1939). In this acute if labyrinthine study of a compromised individual, he telescopes past and present, playing over the sweep of Western history and culture with a dazzling range of allusions from Homer and Nero to Poe and Lenin, displaying his erudition but failing to ignite the reader's engaged interest.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This dystopian work, originally published in Germany in 1977, is set in a small city-state in the future and narrated by a young historian and servant of the ruling tyrant, the Condor. With minimal plot and character development, Eumeswil is unsatisfying as a novel but fascinating as an apologia pro sua vita . Junger, born in 1895, forged his political ideas in the same cauldron in which fascism was wrought, and he was one of the very few major Weimar-era authors to continue writing and publishing in Nazi Germany. The novel explores the character of the anarch , whose dispassionate stance allows him to serve any state without being corrupted by it. Speaking for a discredited philosophy, Junger can startle his readers with arguments against equality, universal education, and the democratic state while advocating such things as mercenary armies and the gold standard. General readers as well as specialists in the era should consider.
- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
