On the Marble Cliffs

by Ernst Jünger, Tess Lewis (Translator), Jessi Jezewska Stevens (Introduction), Maurice Blanchot (Afterword)

Overview

Now in a new translation, an imaginative, darkly radiant fable about a pair of brothers, formerly warriors, whose idyll is shattered by an encroaching fascistic force.

Set in a world of its own, Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs is both a mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism. The narrator of the book and his brother, Otho, live in an ancient house carved out of the great marble cliffs that overlook the Marina, a great and beautiful lake that is surrounded by a peaceable land of ancient cities and temples and flourishing vineyards. To the north of the cliffs are the grasslands of the Campagna, occupied by herders. North of that, the great forest begins. There the brutal Head Forester rules, abetted by the warrior bands of the Mauretanians.

The brothers have seen all too much of war. Their youth was consumed in fighting. Now they have resolved to live quietly, studying botany, adding to their herbarium, consulting the books in their library, involving themselves in the timeless pursuit of knowledge. However, rumors of dark deeds begin to reach them in their sanctuary. Agents of the Head Forester are infiltrating the peaceful provinces he views with contempt, while peace itself, it seems, may only be a mask for heedlessness.

Tess Lewis’s new translation of Jünger’s sinister fable of 1939 brings out all of this legendary book’s dark luster.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681376264
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was a German philosopher, writer, and entomologist who became widely known for Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I. He was the author of six novels, including The Glass Bees (available from NYRB Classics), and dozens of works of philosophy. During his lifetime, he received the Goethe Prize as well as the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Tess Lewis has translated works from the French and German, including books by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, and Christine Angot, and for NYRB Classics, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin. Her awards include the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She serves as the co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee and is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was a French writer and philosopher whose books, including Death Sentence, Thomas the Obscure, and The Space of Literature, frequently blended narrative and theory.

Editorial Reviews

Jünger brings to mind a different epoch, one when both soldiering and philosophy held a vastly different status in civic life...[his] writing has a comparable feeling with certain alchemical emblems: still waters, wise vipers, and black dogs. One encounters a blissed-out feel for the natural world here, but also terrible foreboding. On the Marble Cliffs is a warning of what lies up ahead.” —Ian Penman, City Journal

"On the Marble Cliffs [is] a parable of ascendant barbarism that contains an oblique protest against Nazism…[In] On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger attempted something riskier: a dark fable with unmistakable modern overtones." —Alex Ross, The New Yorker

“The classical beauty of the writing, in Tess Lewis’s exquisite translation, gives a sense of the author’s sympathies. . . . [H]is short, prismatic book is beautiful.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] literary achievement of the highest order.” —Nil Santiáñez, The Massachusetts Review

“[Jünger] was a sporadic critic of the moral obtuseness that grew like vines all around him.” —Thomas Meany, Harper’s Magazine

“Jünger’s coolly detached empirical style, with its Nietzschean cadences evident in On the Marble Cliffs, has its detractors. . . . Yet the primacy of his poetic imagination, his born naturalist’s observational perceptiveness, and the noble humanness undergirding his writing lend it unequivocal greatness.” —Will Stone, Times Literary Supplement

“On the Marble Cliffs might be called Jünger’s descent into the maelstrom, a record of terror seen and survived. . . . An allegory that does not moralize, its hermeticism is inviolable and inimitable.” —Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945

“On the Marble Cliffs is a great book and virtually no one I’ve ever mentioned it to has read it.” —W.S. Merwin

From the Publisher

02/01/2023

First published in Germany on the eve of World War II, this haunting elegiac fable about the fragility of civilization gets a powerful and timely new translation by Tess Lewis. In a vaguely European monastic retreat, veterans of an ignominious war reverently study nature and observe ancient ways, humbly drawing "ever nearer the mysteries hidden in the dust." From their aerie, they observe with mounting alarm the rise of the Head Forester, a charismatic figure of "reckless arrogance" and "terrifying joviality" to whom the masses flock "the way snakes are drawn to an open fire." As time-honored traditions and taboos give way to strange new gods, "dreadful icons" devoted to a rude sense of justice and equality "centered solely on vengeance," the anchorites' quietism offers no recourse but flight. VERDICT More than a mere roman à clef about Hitler or Stalin (or both), Jünger's vivid and evocative narrative transcends its moment in capturing the ageless struggle between our individuality and creative wonder, and the darkness and terror sure to follow when people abandon themselves to belief, even if only to a belief in nothing.

Library Journal