The Twilight World, translated from German by Michael Hofmann, unfolds over 132 pages. Most of the narrative takes place in the claustrophobic, delirious confines of the jungle, an environment Herzog is intimately familiar with and evokes with eerie precision. “It’s a place of fever dreams.”

As he does with his documentaries, which he often narrates, Herzog inserts himself in the story as a guide. The novel begins with his account of meeting Onoda, then jumps back in time to the island, where Onoda was held captive by his own self-delusion. Even when Herzog recedes into the background, adopting the voice of an omniscient narrator, the prose is unmistakably Herzogian: “Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream, but Onoda’s war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.”

Herzog bristled slightly when I asked why he is drawn to stories of zealots who go to extreme lengths to pursue their obsessions — figures such as Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, whose quest to commune with bears ended with his being mauled to death, and Lope de Aguirre, whose mission to find a lost city of gold was chronicled by Herzog in his 1972 historical drama, Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

“They are all family. You recognise your siblings,” he said of his subjects. “I think none of my characters are extreme nor strange. They are dignified human beings, and they take the struggle of life as it’s thrown at them.”

Born in Munich in 1942, Herzog had a tumultuous childhood, uprooted by war and marked by poverty. His family fled Munich after the city was bombed and settled in a village on the Austrian border, where they lived without running water or mattresses. Herzog didn’t see a film until he was 11, something he used to forge his distinctive style. “I saw cinema so late in life for the first time, I didn’t know it even existed, so I had to invent it,” he said.

Herzog fell under the spell of American B-movies such as Zorro and began writing screenplays. He started making his first movie, Herakles, when he was 19. He released his first feature film, Signs of Life, in 1968, to immediate acclaim from critics and prize juries, a reputation that was solidified in the 1970s and ’80s as he delivered a string of award-winning films.

For the past two decades, Herzog has lived in Los Angeles, with his wife Lena, a photographer. Other than reading and cooking for friends, he has few hobbies, and most of his time is consumed by his work. (“I’m a working man,” he said more than once.)

Herzog has published a handful of nonfiction books, including Of Walking in Ice and Conquest of the Useless, an account of the calamities that befell the production of Fitzcarraldo.

Although he professes to have few literary influences — “My prose is somehow very much homegrown,” he said — he is a wide-ranging and passionate reader. Asked about his favorite authors, he rattled off a list that included J.A. Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virgil (“Georgics, not the Aeneid”), an anonymous Norse poetry collection, and Friedrich Hölderlin, a German poet and philosopher (“Almost untranslatable, because he became insane fairly young”).

Although Herzog started late, fiction came naturally, he said. He began working on The Twilight World in the fall of 2020, when he was unable to make movies during the pandemic, and Lena suggested that he occupy himself with writing. He based the story on conversations he had with Onoda, and consulted Onoda’s autobiography to verify details.

“He lived some sort of a fictitious war, it was a figment, a fantasy, it was fever dreams in the jungle, but he solidified the fiction into a real war,” Herzog said. “It became something beyond logic, beyond our logic, but for him it had logic, and that makes him tragic.”

For Herzog, Onoda’s story represents a feat of imagination that is almost as admirable as it is delusional. It’s also, to Herzog, not strange at all.

“I do believe that, to a certain degree, we all live a certain fiction that we have accepted and articulated and formulated for ourselves,” Herzog said. “We are permanently in some kind of performance.”

The New York Times

The Twilight World is published by The Bodley Head at $35 on July 5.

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