Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination. The German film-maker has become meme-ified and satirised – not his work, but his person, his wild-haired, Bavarianaccented, sad-eyed, difficult-truth-intoning person. As I read this book, I found myself thinking of the bears at my local zoo. Two young grizzlies were introduced last year; I became fascinated bythem. As I watched the bears play, swim and sleep, I was occasionally visited by strange, glinting moments of dark understanding: that they were predators, that if I met them in the wild, they might very well consign me to the void.
Of course, bears are Herzogian – after all, he made the documentary Grizzly Man, about one conservationist’s obsession with the creatures. The void, too, is ineluctably Herzogian – it hovers at…
