A National Bestseller! The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and would meet many times, talking for hours and together unraveling the story of Onoda’s long war. At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army’s return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. . . . There is only one rule. You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can. So began Onoda’s long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades—until eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making. In The Twilight World, Herzog immortalizes and imagines Onoda’s years of absurd yet epic struggle in an inimitable, hypnotic style—part documentary, part poem, and part dream—that will be instantly recognizable to fans of his films. The result is a novel completely unto itself, a sort of modern-day Robinson Crusoe tale: a glowing, dancing meditation on the purpose and meaning we give our lives.

Given Werner Herzog's talent as a director and given how crazy the subject was, we had pretty high hopes for this novelization of the experiences of the Japanese soldier who remained at his post in the Philippines for decades after the war ended. It's a really ripe topic to explore which makes it really shocking how little the novel does with it. It's not the book is bad -- it does a serviceable job of providing the setting and going through the history of how the soldier ended up isolated and what his inner experience may have been. But the story never does more than just give you glimpses of moments in his history. Given the isolation, the anachronism of thinking the war was going on while the world moved on, and the ideas of dedication and loyalty, you can just imagine a ton of experimental and powerful things an author could have done to make this story shine. But here Herzog just presents it in an almost matter-of-fact way. We really weren't sure what we gained from reading the novel that we didn't get just from hearing the premise. It's not a hard book to read and it's not painful to get through. The writing is fine and the interior monologue is believable. You'll get through it fast if you try. But we're not sure why you would when there is so little that's interesting happening in it.