Claire Dederer in The Guardian:
Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination. At least I think it’s the public imagination and not just my own. The German film-maker has become meme-ified and satirised – not his work, but his person, his wild-haired, Bavarian-accented, sad-eyed, difficult-truth-intoning person. As I read Herzog’s new book, I found myself thinking of the bears at my local zoo. Two young grizzlies were introduced last year; I became fascinated by them and went to see them almost every week. As I watched the bears play and 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 (if I may turn man into adjective) – after all, he made the documentary Grizzly Man, about one conservationist’s obsession with the creatures. And the void, too, is ineluctably Herzogian – it hovers at the centre of his work, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Fitzcarraldo to the great and largely unloved Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But really I was thinking about the gap between the way the bears are perceived – adorable! – and the reality of their being: they will eat you. Herzog himself has undergone some kind of similar schism in the popular consciousness. He has become, personally, a zoo animal, and this autobiography reminds us once again that he is a fearsome and strange force.
More here.