Customer Reviews

The Glass Bees

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How do you even begin to do justice to a novel like this? I would imagine that this could very well be a polarizing novel. (Keep in mind my personal philosophy is largely derived from Rene Guenon, et al.) However, I don't think anyone could doubt the quality of the prose itself.

As stated, very little actually happens. Actually, the "action" herein is probably a mere tenth or so of the length, but don't be fooled - Junger will string you along for a few pages, and then hit you with a philosophical passage that begs reading and re-reading. This is a science fiction novel by technical definition, although there is little actual emphasis on the technology; it is presented more as an allegory for the modern age.

The plot is very simple. Captain Richard, an aging war veteran, is given a job interview by the "great Zapparoni" (who is sort of mixture between Walt Disney and Rupert Murdoch). Richard, despite having no short amount of noblisse oblige (nurtured in an earlier, more noble era) nevertheless has cultivated an identity based on failure, largely resulting from being out of step with the current age. He is a man caught between two worlds - he cannot bear to destroy himself even in lieu of the pointlessness of modern existence, yet is unwilling to sacrifice himself to the new technological gods, who demand little more than technical efficiency and blind obedience at the expense of human perfection.

When I was reading this novel, I was reminded of Spengler's introduction to _The Decline of the West_, in which he differentiated between "men of action" and "men of contemplation". Men of action, Spengler said, are the logical result of the particular era they live in (sadly, the figures of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush probably exemplify our own era.) Richard, on the other hand, is a man of contemplation, if perhaps not a great one. He paradoxically realizes that he is trapped in circumstances beyond his control while the "men of action" - who can do little but mirror the values of the modern age - do not stop even for a second to consider anything at all.

Richard knows that Zapparoni, who has built an empire based upon animatronic robots, is little more than the logical product of his age. Richard must come to terms with Zapparoni - who is less a figure than a representation of the modern industrial age. It is a world where "efficiency" and predictable order take precedence over any mere human interest, and "progress" is little more than the continual play of technological novelty.

Richard realizes that no reads Herodotus any more; he pontificates on the nature of the man who is infinitely adaptible. In a telling scene, a former horseman and comrade-in-arms is now a petty bureaucrat in the public transportation system of his city, and elicits little more than disdain for their old days in the army.

I won't give the conclusion away, but the end result isn't a happy one - and it will doubtlessly not sit well with those of us who simply "do what we have to do to get by" in lieu of overwhelming feelings of powerlessness and anomie that characterize the modern age (even as Americans possess the highest standard of living of any people in the history of planet.) This novel poses many questions: to what degree do we limit the possibility of human perfection by striving for technical perfection? Is it possible for the person inherently out of touch with the values of the modern age to find meaning in existence? And most importantly: do human values have any place in the modern era at all?

In the end, I believe Junger has created perhaps the most succinct testimony to modern spiritual death yet written.

A couple of decades ago The Washington Post interviewed a number of illustious writers and asked each of them to name the 10 best books they had ever read. I read the lists, mentally judging whether or not I would have selected the same books and noting the books I had not read that I might. The lists included the usual references to MOBY DICK, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and the BIBLE, but one list included THE GLASS BEES by Ernst Junger.

For reasons unknown to me, I am attracted to any book with the word bees or honey in the title, but the fact that the protagonist Captain Richard was a German veteran also caught my interest. I had read many books, articles, etc. by and about U.S. soldiers and veterans, but had not read anything by or about German veterans and I wanted to know more. Also, at the time I discovered THE GLASS BEES the newspapers were filled with articles about unemployed Vietnam veterans, so the fact that Captian Richard was also unemployed further intrigued me.

Now I don't like science fiction, but, by the time I realized THE GLASS BEES was science fiction (at least it was when the book was written), I found myself hooked on a book I would never have gone out of my way to read, about things I did not want to know. I am a gardener, and I love nature, but this book presents a terrifying look into a world anyone who loves nature will abhor.

THE GLASS BEES is about the war technological forces are waging against nature. Have you read THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN by Leo Marx? This is the next step. Forget the locomotive engine crashing through the underbrush, the technology in this book makes the locomotive engine look positively benign. Siegfried Mandel wrote in a New York Times review that THE GLASS BEES presents "scenes as harrowing and thought-disturbing as any created by Karel Capek, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley."

When Junger wrote THE GLASS BEES he was aware of the tecnological improvisations of the Nazis including the crematoriums and rockets. The Nuremburg trials had uncovered one scientific horror after another. Junger could foresee the future when capitalistic forces would rule and everything would be artificial. Unfortunately, he was a prophet. Today our food, houses, clothing, medicines, you name it are all artificial. And, we are ruled by a dozen international corporations.

THE GLASS BEES is one of the top ten books I have ever read and it ought to be mandatory reading for high school students. I think of Junger's book everyday. And, just in case I might forget, over my patio, next to the wind chimes, I've hung a glass bee.

Captain Richard trained as a swashbuckling cavalry officer, but increasingly mechanised forms of warfare forced him to become a tank technician. Now, down on his luck after a life that reads like a radically compressed history of the twentieth century, he approaches the industrialist Zapparoni for a job. As the book came out in the 1950s and its author was born before the turn of the century, Zapparoni's products are called "robots" or "automata"; but they're a far cry from Asimov's Robots and Mechanical Men. As Bruce Sterling points out in his intriguing introduction, some passages from The Glass Bees, taken out of context, might easily have come from a computer magazine of the 1990s, blaring the wonders of miniaturisation and CD-ROM. The bulk of the novel comprises Richard's meditations before, during and after his interview with Zapparoni, and Junger's prescience is impressive not only in terms of the technology he envisages, but also in terms of its effect. Richard notes, for example, that the artificial bees' total efficiency in collecting nectar - not a drop left inside - will simply cause the flowers to die off through lack of cross-pollination. Written with brilliant and chilly clarity, and climaxing in an episode of restrained horror and terrifying ambiguity, The Glass Bees is an examination of the moral and cultural price of technology, from the perspective of a man who had seen plenty. However, although Sterling compares him with Celine, Junger is neither rancorous nor misanthropic. Indeed, despite the fact that Richard's wife is mentioned only a few times and never appears in person, the book is also a rather touching affirmation of human love.

Many people in Europe consider Juenger a cultural Titan of the XX's century, some sort of new Goethe who has crossed the whole century ( he lived 102 years dying just two years ago). This is one of his most famous novels where he muses about the rol and meaning of technology in a very heideggarian and nietzchian way. Unfortunaly we still don't have his main work. his Journals from the second world war, translated into English

The Glass Bees is a short novel about power, technology and nature. It's also the story of a life; the life of a veteran german captain that has lived in two very different worlds: the "old" world where words like "courage" or "pride" still meant something and a "new" world where the words have lost their meaning, where the power of the State has almost been surrended to huge high-tech transnational firms and where efficency criteria leads the behaviour of most of the peolple. The story tells the way in which the old world's man tries (unsuccsesfully most of the times)to fit himself in the new world.
In my opinion The Glass Bees is an outstanding novel althoug -I have to say it- not one of the 10 best books I have ever read as another reviewer says.

Ernst Junger died at the age of 102 in 1997. However interest in The Glass Bees (originally published in 1957) is more a credit to the book's prescience than its extraordinarily long-lived author. In the novel, the head of a multinational animation studio develops a new variety of movies using lifelike automatons indistinguishable from real actors. The glass bees of the title are his newest gizmos, as small as bees yet outperforming what they mimic, recreating and specializing themselves until their evolution races past their creators' control. More a meditation than a novel, this work airs the views of its narrator, a former cavalry officer obsessed with the ravages of modernity, specifically the way it makes our lives easier and more unpleasant. More ease, the old soldier says, has made us more prone to complain instead of less. While it's impossible to outline all the ideas in the officer's heady ruminations, they have a common theme: he was better off when his work was real.

A wonderful work by Junger. An interesting contrast to his On Pain. I see three basic themes running through the work. First is what Man is doing to himself through ever increasing technological improvements. Junger first points out the beauty of the accomplishments, but then emphasizes their sinister destructiveness. The second theme is that of how this has changed the very essence of mankind. The former cavalryman, imbued with honor and humaneness, becomes a mere mechanic with the advent of the tank and has little use in the new age. Finally, Junger seems to really emphasize the importance of our formative experiences in shaping our selves. Again and again, he comes back to the education given by the cavalry instructor to his young charges and this helps the protagonist through the puzzles set forth by Zapparoni. While not a science-fiction work, it does have hints of Philip K. Dick or the Asimov robot stories . Not the easiest of reads, but still accessible and relevant. Beautifully translated.

THE GLASS BEES is an interesting, even fascinating book. It isn't necessarily an easy one to read, but then again, Ernst Jünger isn't known for his light touch with a pen. Like a lot of German authors, he writes in the "romantisch-pathetisch" style that translates into English rather clumsily, and makes frequent, somewhat rambling digressions which often go on for many pages and challenge the reader's patience. Unlike many of his countrymen, however, he is also capable of writing outbursts of prose so beautifully put together they sound like poetry and remain stuck in the mind forevermore. For this reason, and for his keen observations on life and the human condition, I am always willing to wade into Jünger's works, even when I know it will be heavy going.

THE GLASS BEES is something of a prophetic book, straddling the line between science-fiction and alternate history. Written in the mid-1950s, it foretold many aspects of modern life, most notably the rise of super-corporations led by brilliant but morally ambiguous men, the life-changing effects of technology, and the shift in moral climate that come about as a result of these things. The protagonist, Richards, is an ex-officer looking for work in a postwar economy that views him as something of an anachronism. Instilled with the classic military virtues, but lacking the ruthlessness and unscrupulousness which seems to define the modern man, Richards is practically starving when an old comrade sets up with a job interview with Zapparoni, a sort of cross between Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Walt Dinsney. Zapparoni is the brain of a corporate empire whose artificially intelligent, labor-saving machines have revolutionized both everyday life and the concept of entertainment, and his public image is of a charitable, child-loving, benificent old man. Richards, however, has heard more ominous things about Zapparoni: to wit, that he is really a monomaniacal control freak who crushes his corporate rivals into paste and terrorizes his own employees into slavelike obedience, "disappearing" anyone who becomes inconvenient. Richards, however, is desperate to provide for his beloved wife and marches grimly into Zapparoni's compound, reflecting as he tours the facilities on the tectonic changes in society which have occurred in his lifetime. Between audiences with the coldly enigmatic titan, Richards makes a number of jarring discoveries , not the least of which is that he cannot outrun the values instilled in him by his military academy training. The question then becomes twofold: will he leave the compound alive after what he has discovered, and if he does, can he find a place in a world where profit-motive, amorality and lust for power have replaced duty, honor and tradition?

THE GLASS BEES is undoubtedly a strange book, and it is arguable that if Jünger's prose style were less digressive and turgid his observations and questions would have been clearer and easier to understand. However, this does not change the fact that those observations and questions, penned fifty years ago, are not only relevant in today's world but actually crucial. The increasing power of corporations, ominous as that may be, is nothing compared to the way their "values" of Machiavellianism, greed and amorality have become the values of countless millions of people. On the other hand, the desire of scientists to play god just for the sake of it, which Jünger alludes to by showing us Zapparoni's mechanical bees, is not merely a warning about the threat technology poses to the ordinary man (who increasingly finds himself redundant in the workplace) but of the dangers of doing things simply because they can be done, without ever stopping to ask if they should be.

Captain Richard, black listed by the armed services, is desperate for a job and approaches an influential ex cavalry comrade,Twinning's, to intercede. He sends him to Zapparoni,a leviathan of not only robotic technology but also the childrens entertainment industry. At Zapparoni's huge compound-a kind of area 51-Richard shares a brief exchange with the enigmatic man before being ushered out into the garden with a warning to "Beware of the bees." Zapparoni is testing him....
Absolutely breath taking. Richard Wright once said; "Books are my drug" and like all avid readers you read book after book waiting for highs such as "Glass Bees" gives the mind.
A cross between Robert Musil and George Orwell (mixed with a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald's 'Diamond as big as the Ritz're the paranoia of extreme wealth and power)Junger considers a world that constantly changes and renders the past obsolete; these changes being falsely labeled as progress when the true reason for constant change is power; who has it and what they have that gives this.
Now-faster than ever before-people's lives are being rendered obsolete by technology-(the humble printer now outdated by e-tech?!)Whereas it took centuries before the longbow was superceded by gunpowder and the accompanying power shift that entailed,Junger looks at and accurately forsees the huge and accellerating changes that went on in the 20th century. He is frighteningly accurate about technology and power, and that the absurd sums of money poured into it have everything to do with power and little to do with the much feted 'progress'. His quote that the most absurd economics are followed when it comes to power is matched by many other quotables in this book; "We cling to our theories and fit phenomena to them"works for me on so many levels I've burned it into my brain to bring forth when needed!
Classed as Sci-Fi by some (certainly it predicts the future and the technologies it aims for) this book fits any definition of classic and great must read literature. Brilliant!

I gather when this novel came out, it was widely dismissed as irrelevant. It was probably out of sync with the contemporary German political sensibility with political parties that assured everyone that they were democratic and centrist.Given Jungers political history, I suspect a lot of people weren't all that eager to hear his reflections on contemporary society.Part of the books power comes from the fact that while you can see it as a withering critique of the shallowness of contemporary society ,it's calm and rather good natured.This is no Celine style screed.Mostly , Captain Richard tells you about himself and meditates on the way we live now.It is very German with a romantic fixation on authenticity and alienation.Yet it manages to be "light".That is the key to it's success.You are reading a philosophical novel of some real depth, yet you never feel your being hit over the head with poorly digested philosophy.Junger was an amazing man ( if you doubt that read STORM OF STEEL as well).It's apparent from this novel that he was also a remarkably subtle writer.