OF WALKING IN ICE, Werner Herzog

OF WALKING IN ICE is an old book by Werner Herzog that I read in 2016. Part journal, part travelogue, part dream record, it’s the story of Werner Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris to visit a dying friend — on the magical belief that if he walked there, the friend would not die. That’s six hundred miles. It’s kind of heartbreaking, in its way. And it’s the dead of winter, so Herzog is walking face-first into horizontal snowstorms for a lot of it. But it’s also very beautiful, in its descriptions of the frozen German countryside and his little pen-portraits of the people he sees (and mostly avoids) along the way. And the dreams are deliciously strange.

Is the Loneliness good? Yes, it is. There are only dramatic vistas ahead. The festering Rankness, meanwhile, gathers once again at the sea.

It’s short, often melancholic, but, in its way, weirdly life-affirming, even as he treads through the dead world towards a deathbed. A proper winter book. Herzog is a global treasure.

Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish.

OF WALKING IN ICE, Werner Herzog (UK) (US+)