Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

        I’ve heard the hype around Ottessa Moshfegh for a few years as a new voice for the messy woman trope, hyped up in particular by both BookTok and my students but validated by some of my esteemed readerly friends. I was very kindly gifted Death in Her Hands as my introduction to her oeuvre. I’m told it’s her worst work, but even so I found it a really interesting project.

The book starts with a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” A compelling opening. Ripe for an unfolding murder mystery. But instead Moshfegh draws from and subverts the mystery genre in equal measure to a really interesting effect.

The investigation reads more like a dream sequence that would feel at home in a Murakami novel—or more accurately, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the central character is perpetually waylaid by half-formed plots and doubtful illusions. Each step of the journey—or in this case the investigation—seems to be interrupted before reaching completion, never quite circling back into coherence. A vital clue is found only to be interrupted by her dog going missing; the quest for a missing dog is interrupted by a fainting spell, and so on. From the first pages of the book I trained myself to expect irresolution—and that is the best mindset to go in with; I don’t expect anyone who wants a whodunnit will close this book with a sigh of satisfaction.

That’s because Death in Her Hands is largely a book of possibility. At the level of the word, of the sentence, events are framed in the conditional while perpetually denying resolution. Consider this passage as emblematic of what the book achieves; I’ll take the liberty of bolding the words that point towards equivocation:

If any of them knew Magda, if they cared about her, they hadn’t noticed she’d been gone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Maybe she’d gone out, with Blake, I supposed, and they had gotten in some trouble. [...] What nerve he had, leaving Magda’s body all alone. He must have been involved somehow. I wasn’t an expert in crime, but I knew this much: Black was a suspect. He had contact with Magda’s dead body. He knew something. It wasn’t me. His denial only made him seem scared and paranoid. And if I knew anything about paranoia, it was that it sprang from guilt and regret. Always. I’d seen it clear as day in Walter when we were having our troubles. “You’re crazy,” guilty people say. They try to dismiss your inquiries. “You’re paranoic,” Walter insisted. Guilty people will try to divert your attention. “Vee vere just talkink! I vas just helping her!” he said. Nobody will ever find her. Blake was guilty of something, whether of murder or neglect or stupidity, I didn’t know yet. If there were any actions to be taken, the first would be to find that boy. I had little to go on. But then again, the town was small. He was literate, that Blake. I knew that at least. And he had enough common sense to know if someone was alive or not. He must have felt Magda’s wrist or throat. I wondered how long he’d waited, wishing or not wishing for her heart to beat. (62)

Look at the language here: “if”s, “or”s, “maybe”s, and if we’re feeling generous the speculative “must have.” There’s a vagueness and hedging: “I wasn’t an expert,” “I didn’t know yet,” “I had little to go on,” or “then again.” The mist of uncertainty permeates the novel.

As the story progresses, the central character, 70 year old Vesta Gul becomes a detective, using the search engine Ask Jeeves (RIP) at the library to search for tips on solving murders and writing detective stories. It’s somewhat comic, this elderly woman playing detective, but there’s a surreal and metafictional quality to the work. For example, in the lengthy passage I quoted above, she notes that “paranoia [...] sprang from guilt and regret” (62). In this section, she’s alluding to her husband’s adultery, which is later shown to be quite extensive. His gaslighting seems to be a contributing factor to her paranoia. Elsewhere, she also discusses how he was so good at solving murder mysteries and said how obvious the solutions were if you knew the conventions—the culprit was always the person just west of center. With these details, I myself was sprung into a paranoiac mentality: is Vesta gaslighting us and she really knows who killed Magda. Is her husband himself the person just west of center, guilty of taking the life of one of his student devotees? 

The surrealism of the text is predominantly a result of Vesta’s strange relationship to narrative. Throughout the book, Vesta develops theories of who is involved in the mystery, developing a list of suspects from around town. She invents Blake, the young man who was trying to help the rebellious (but vulnerable) Magda. Magda ends up renting a room in Shirley’s house as a favour but Magda also works a job caring for an old man and maybe being romantically involved with his son and at least one other abusive man. It’s the kind of network of associations that would feel like Laura Palmer’s in Twin Peaks. The strange part, though, is that Vesta encounters these people as if they are real. In following Blake’s tracks, she finds a poem in William Blake’s poetry that has been underlined in a library book and then uses that to guide her. When a woman locks her car keys inside her car and asks Vesta for help, Vesta stumbles into the Shirley she invented. The creep at the gas station has the same name as the one she invented for one of her creeps. The coincidences abound, so much so that it can’t possibly be true. It’s as though Vesta enters in and out of the narrative she herself invented and it brings doubt as to whether any of this is real.

As a brief aside, I can’t help but notice that Vesta Gul continually corrects people on her name throughout the book. It is specifically not said as Vesta Gool but as Vesta Gul. Either way, it has an odd resonance with the word “vestibule” and I can’t help but feel that the central character of Death In Her Hands is in a similar kind of liminal space, both in- and out- of the stories she enters. When she’s filling in character sheets for the people in her mystery story (she was told she needs a list of suspects), she invents a “ghoul” for the story (again, oddly resonant with her name—implicating her, perhaps, in her own story). When she writes the name though, the ‘u’ and the ‘l’ blend together into a ghod combo and thereafter she names the unseen shadowy monster in the story as Ghod. Ghod exerts agency and chaos into her story—it’s only later that she encounters a police officer and equates Ghod with the law. 

The encounters Vesta has with other characters often reads as stilted and awkward, which adds to the atmospheric oddity of the text. For example, at one point, Vesta discovers that her car won’t start and when she calls a repairman she discovers her wires have been cut. The repairman suggests maybe she cut her own wires. The conversation orbits the possibility of repair before the repairman gets metaphysical. She asks, “can you fix it?” and he says, “It can’t be fixed. What you have here is irreparable damage. Don’t you know there is no life after death? You know this it, don’t you? You aren’t going anywhere” (198). It seems to me a leap that no real person would make at that moment. As they continue their conversation, Vesta suggests she’ll walk if she has to and he responds with the ominous, “All I can say is that when you walk into that forest, that forest is all you’ll see” (198). It’s the kind of aphoristic line that could be translated into the Twin Peaks red room. There’s an uncomfortable communion between Vesta and her townsfolk. Vesta approaches a house looking for her dog and stumbles upon a death party for a woman who is not seeking cancer treatment and has invited her friends to gather for a last hoorah. The two talk about being neighbors (everybody mentions that Vesta lives on “the old Girl Scout camp”) and they share memories. The woman says she went there when she was little and had intended to buy it. She refers to the ghost story that circulated about it. Vesta is incredulous: “‘Ghost story?’ I said. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cackle” (207). The both of them seem to be ghosts themselves, in that liminal space between life and death. The woman says, “Ghod told us your name once. What was it again? He’ll be here later. We’ve cast him as the lead investigator with instructions to come dressed as Sherlock Holmes. But he’ll probably show up in his uniform, as always” (207). There are layers of fiction here: Vesta has invented the character Ghod, embodied him in the police officer, and now a new character is referring to him in the same way despite there being no way she would have that knowledge. Within this fiction, the woman is hosting a party in which everyone comes in disguise: a murder mystery party is its own fiction within the fiction.

There are several other motifs that play into this idea of guiding fictions. Early in the book we’re introduced to Pastor Jimmy, a man with a radio show offering religious guidance. Vesta listens to his fire and brimstone advice and internalizes his voice. She calls in to the show and struggles to express herself but Pastor Jimmy attempts some guidance; later, when she talks to the repairman later on, he reveals that Pastor Jimmy has been dead for years and that all the shows are reruns (198). Pastor Jimmy is presented as an illusion responsive to the inner workings of Vesta’s imagination. When her dog Charlie goes missing, Vesta considers enlisting (the maybe fictional) Shirley’s help and then the police’s help. From there, she imagines a whole scenario and uses it as justification for not following up. Again, the sentences switch to the conditional tense:

But I had no phone, and involving Shirley would only complicate things. I could imagine the kind of laughter I’d get if I called the police.
“Crazy old lady, the old Girl Scout, her dog went missing,” they’d say around the station.
“Wonder where he went.”
“Dumb old mutt.”
“Probably ran away. Who’d want to stick around with that old hag, that monster, that witch? Hansel and Gretel, is that the story? The crazy old hag who lived alone in the woods? Or am I thinking of Goldilocks? Whatever it is, she’s a bitch, that’s for sure.”
Brutes, those cops were, talking about me that way. Didn’t they know I’d been the wife of a scientist? Didn’t they know I’d worn the most elegant silk blend dresses, gone to dinners at the university? The wife of a state senator had complimented me on my hairdo. They’d printed my picture in the paper a few times. I’d sung in a chorus at college. I’d studied Japanese calligraphy. (187)

Vesta imagines what they would say. Even when she imagines what they say, even in her imagination they’re uncertain: the dog “probably” ran away. The way Vesta imagines herself in the eyes of others is pretty critical. She characterizes herself as the monster of a fairy tale before trying to counteract it with who she actually was. Also worth noting, though, is how often these assessments are all phrased as questions.

In fact, one of the novel’s key questions is that of identity. Who is Vesta? Who is Magda? Are any of these people actually people? Early in the text, Vesta narrates that “It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody” (17). She’s referring to the note she found, but there’s a doubling here. She continues to say that “there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank.” (17). She corrects people on her name “to avoid confusion.” There’s a motif of names and their implications—even her dog is named Charlie so that “when we were feeling regal, [she]’d call him Charles” (17). 

A key aspect of the book is Vesta’s relationship with her dog. Her dog is somewhat emblematic of her own experiences. One day her dog Charlie brings her a dead bird. Despite an apparent disjointedness, there’s a clear parallel here. Death is brought to Vesta in the form of a note, but also in the form of a bird. Death is dropped at her feet: “That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths” (15). Vesta and Charlie are aligned through a compulsion to retrieve a dead thing. She recognizes the danger for Charlie, but ignores the danger for herself. She doesn’t seem to recognize her own compulsion even in the same moment: “I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself” (15). She also reflects on Charlie’s origin. She explains how Charlie was discovered two months ago in black duffel bag on the riverbank and how he was the only one of the litter that survived. She narrates, “I spent a minute piecing that together” (17). Vesta stitches reality into place. “From then on,” she says, “I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-coloured pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine” (17). She recreates the moment, a revisionist moment where she can reforge her relationship with Charlie and with her sense of self.

If I were to sum up the book’s core motifs, it’s about identity, imagination, paranoia, death, storytelling, and so on. In one moment, Vesta loads Charlie into the car and decides not to go lock her cabin door: “No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it?” (48). Vesta recognizes that suspicion invites danger—but can’t help herself but feel that suspicion everywhere she goes. She brings danger to herself while recognizing that if you “keep the imagination soft and happy, [...] only good things will come” (48). If this mystery is all a matter of perspective, Vesta might project a better outcome with a shift in her mindset. In that passage, she proceeds to list all the dead things out in the woods, starting with Magda and then working towards mice and rabbits that are never found and none of them were ever buried. “What’s so wrong about that?” she asks herself, “Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself” (48). There’s a strange distancing taking place where Vesta tries to downplay the death of a human being. Yet, she returns. She obsesses. She tries to find a solution that will bring coherence to this death.

Death In Her Hands is a dream sequence—perhaps more accurately described as a nightmare—where dream logic guides us through a series of detours. It creates an atmosphere of suspension and paranoia where not even Vesta is above suspicion. It’s worth noting that her beloved dog becomes terrified of her after it returns from being missing. The line between the imagined and the real blurs, leading to an irresolution that would not satisfy many readers, though it worked for me. The novel reads as almost an anti-mystery. The note points to a body, but ultimately we’re left without corpus delicti. As much as Vesta follows the rules, the clues never add up. So here we are. Adrift.

Happy reading!

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

        File On Earth as It Is Beneath under “intense short novels.” Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2026, Ana Paula Maia and translator Padma Viswanathan present the bleak final days of a penal colony isolated from the rest of the world and seemingly forgotten completely. At the opening of the novel, the remaining prisoners can be counted essentially on one hand and as the novel progresses we learn more about the root cause of their dwindling numbers: the warden of the penal colony, a Colonel Kurtz type named Melquíades who hunts prisoners for sport under the guise of giving them the “opportunity” to escape. The colony is beyond all hope and even Melquíades and the remaining guard, Taborda, know it.

        The backdrop of the novel is that the inspector will soon be paying a visit—and several of the colony’s residents see it as a portent of their doom: how could his inspection lead to anything but? The paranoiac atmosphere of the novel is finely wrought, partially because we see each of the residents in isolation and in communion with one another. Bronco Gil, arguably the main character, has plans of escape and advertises those to a trustworthy fellow inmate who later drugs him to disrupt the plan. When Melquíades goes missing, Taborda holes up in a tower with a gun, fearing an uprising from the remaining three prisoners. None of the prisoners can leave the compound, knowing that their ankle monitors double as bombs that will detonate once they reach a certain distance. It’s an oppressive atmosphere rendered all the more ominous as the prisoners dig graves for their fallen comrades—only to find more graves, unspeakable horrors held within boxes mistaken for treasure chests.

        Bronco Gil reflects on his escape plan and he remembers that they had been preparing soil for planting: “The harsh sun burned his brown skin as, with quiet concentration, he dug like someone searching for a secret” (45). Maia then describes in rich detail him finding a human skull and eventually the whole skeleton, bound at the wrists and ankles. He continually discovered more bounds buried in this way: skeletons “of the enslaved, who had lived and died here” (45). The existential reflection kicks in: “Bronco wondered who knew what had happened inside these walls. He understood that he hadn’t been sent here to serve out his sentence but rather to be executed” (45). The ominous grounds reflects Melquíades’ “hunting prisoners, applying what he called his socio-educational measures” (45). Maia’s characterization of the central villain is compelling; Taborda explains that his boss “had gone crazy in recent months, between confinement, isolation and having to live alongside the evil inside every man in this place” (45). So much of the tension in the early section of the book is the knowledge that “Melquíades will never let anyone leave, not even Taborda, and, in the end, he’ll take his own life too. He could never live in society again; he’s eaten away by the system he defends” (45). It’s reminiscent of some of literature’s most unhinged villains—Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh or, as I mentioned, Colonel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. There’s also a layer to it that implies a historical trauma. There is a lot of speculation about the land, but it’s implied that it was the site of mass disappearance and murder, a place of enslavement, torture, and killing. It’s like a haunted house narrative, a story of demonic possession at the hands of history. Given the South American flare of the story, it also feels like an allusive commentary on their difficult histories.

        The interaction between the characters drives the tension, and Maia’s experience as a screenwriter really shines through. For example, we’re given the backstory for how Bronco Gil arrived in prison. Serving as a naive hitman-for-hire, he’s paid to get revenge on a man who killed a woman’s loved one. Ironically, she coaxes two thousand dollars from the man to help care for her sick child—which she then uses to pay for the hit on him. Clean. When Bronco Gil arrives to kill him, there’s a quiet moment where the man asks if he can feed his cats first, which Bronco Gil allows. They then end up in conversation about why the man is being killed, who paid for it, and so on. The tension of the scene is excellent.

        Later in the novel, the inspector Heitor does arrive but Taborda is the one providing the tour. Heitor is asking questions about the colony’s operation that Taborda and the inmates are answering evasively. It’s an interesting moment where the dynamic of the novel shifts: no longer is Taborda a functionary for Melquíades; no longer is Taborda a paranoiac hiding in a tower from the prisoners—Taborda and the inmates form a strange allegiance to one another, covering up for one another’s failings in the hope of making their way through the inspection. It’s comic—nearly a Weekend at Bernie’s type farce—but equally tense. Heitor is asking where Melquíades has gone (“oh, he sent his resignation but the mail must never have gotten there…”), why the colony has dropped from over forty prisoners to under five (“well, there was the outbreak…”), well where were the sick sent (“Melquíades is the only one who had the records, but he sent them to various hospitals…”). On Earth As It Is Beneath shows how easily farce can tip into suspense.

        Taborda’s mental well-being, like the other characters, decays when strained. Early in the book, the prisoners are burying one of their fallen comrades; they come across a box that has horrors within it that make them physically sick and it is largely left as a mystery for the audience what has made this more horrible than their other daily experiences. When Taborda is forced to give Heitor a tour of the colony, Taborda gives up the ruse and reveals that baby skeletons are buried all throughout the colony’s land—that the horror existed long before them and has continued to descend into madness. When Heitor returns to the kitchen, the cook Valdênio prepares the inspector a coffee. Heitor promises the old man that he’ll get them out of prison by the end of the day, but he wants to know the mysterious identity of the prisoner they’re keeping in solitary confinement. When Valdênio reveals that it’s Melquíades, Heitor is astonished. “Why didn’t you all tell who he was?” Heitor asks, and Valdênio responds, “Because we wanted to kill him and spare you” (88). The moment is tense—and by coincidence that statement ends the page. For a moment, it seems like they might kill the inspector, too, to save their skins and not reveal the truth. I’ll leave you to sit in that suspense.

        For such a short novel, it’s action-packed and the twists were superb. Maia outlines Melquíades’ ritual of hunting prisoners. He’ll unclip them both from their bomb anklets and give them thirty seconds to run, after which he hunts them down and murders them. Nobody has ever escaped—hence why Bronco Gil has developed a whole plan about killing Melquíades, stealing his jeep, cutting off his own foot, and driving as far as he can. At one point, though, Melquíades sets two prisoners free and one legitimately escapes. When Melquíades tracks him down, the prisoner is able to knock him out. Later, in a jaw-dropping moment, Melquíades returns to camp dressed in a prisoner’s uniform. The tension of not knowing what he’ll do is expertly delivered; we’ve seen Melquíades act erratically—murderously—and so to see him stumble back into the prison creates an excellent sense of terror, which is undercut by irony.

        In fact, the whole book is fueled with irony. I’ll be spoiling the ending in this paragraph, so feel free to jump ahead. The irony of the ending feels allegorical in nature. Bronco Gil escapes with Valdênio and as they reach the limits of the compound, Valdênio chooses to leave first—he’s old, there’s nothing left for him, etc. He doesn’t explode. The bombs on their ankle monitors were a lie and they might have escaped at any time. In addition to that irony, Bronco Gil is picked up as a hitchhiker and offered a job. The man offering him the job knows full well he was a criminal sent to this Kafka-esque prison (the prisoners are never told why they, of all criminals, were selected for this particular placement.) The man sees Bronco Gil’s ability to survive and escape as an asset, ignoring his criminal past—he will be an asset at the slaughterhouse (a slaughterhouse of all things—think of the parallels!). The man reveals that everyone knows the prison is a horrific place and that nobody ever leaves that hell. Everyone knows that convicts go in and never come out, but nobody seems to really question it or know the specifics. There’s meaning here well worth discussing; I’d love to teach this book to see what people come up with.

        Similarly, Maia has a great sense of imagery and symbolism. The description of the setting is delivered with rich detail and there’s a bit of symbolism that would fit right in with Lord of the Flies: Melquíades collects boar heads that Bronco Gil has killed for him and has them taxidermied—but there are no suitable eyes to be found anywhere (nobody is able to boar witness…with apologies to the concept of language). Melquíades reflects, “It’ll take me a while to get used to those eyes being empty, but apart from that, it’s perfect” (22). The fact that he, too, is a lifeless, soulless entity might reveal some of his own affinities—and fear of—the eyeless boar.

        On Earth As It Is Beneath is a really compelling narrative. The plot and tension drives the work, but it’s elevated beyond an action-thriller by Maia’s deft hand with imagery, symbolism, characterization, and philosophy. There’s enough secrecy and paranoia in the book to compel readers onward and the interactions between the characters really build the suspense that takes the comic and returns it with a rictus visage. It was a great experience—and easily readable within a day for an added bonus.

        Happy reading!

The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog

        Filmic language operates through juxtaposition: we interpret meaning by the proximity of images presented in succession. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Werner Herzog film in full, but the logic of cinematography is readily apparent in his The Future of Truth. Herzog’s book is a strange, little volume whose title makes it sound like it would be philosophy—and it kind of is—but it’s one that operates through association.

In the opening to the book, Herzog explains how philosophers have not been able to adequately define truth and so he has no grand ambitions for his own work. All the same, Herzog explores the idea of truth—not an objective truth, but an emotional truth that seems to govern our age. The circuitous route Herzog takes to get there is strange. The chapters are about topics as diverse as expeditions to the top of Mount Everest and Elon Musk’s mission to Mars and the plots of operas. There are a few common threads that pop up: fake identities, fake news, manipulation of reality through technology, but the way they weave together is primarily suggestive. Intuition guides us through.

Herzog shares vignettes that fit within the broader theme. For example, there is a chapter about Family Romance, LLC and Herzog elucidates the layers of deception involved in the project. (I should really watch this film). In reality, there’s a Japanese business that rents out people for special events—if you have someone unpresentable in your family (like an alcoholic father), you can rent out a stand-in, brief them on the background, and save face. In the film, which Herzog said was mistaken for a documentary, the actual owner of the business appears as a key figure in a story of false identities. At the core: everyone is lying. The hired father is a fake, but the woman he works for and her daughter share stories about a trip they never took. Deception operates throughout the film, but then also after the film there was meant to be an interview with Yuichi Ishii (the CEO) and one of the lonely men that uses the service. Yet, the lonely man selected never actually used their service and was in fact one of the rental family members. Herzog reports that it was a scandal and a loss of face. These layers of mistaken identity run through the text in an interesting way; it’s almost like the reverse of a doppelganger narrative.

Herzog also hops between moments in history to show the broader significance of ‘fakes.’ One chapter, for example, is a “history of fake news” starting with the very founding of Rome and depictions of Nero. It’s a weirdly humanizing take on the notoriously awful emperor; Herzog accounts his pleas for suicide and failed attempts. There’s a desperation in the account that’s quite moving—and then a weird account of the four other Neros who tried to take his place, linking them to the multiple Elvises romping around Japan’s downtown hubs. From there, Herzog jumps to Constantinople and competing popes and forged documents that were discovered during the Renaissance. Brief detour: Herzog talks about his meetings with boxer Mike Tyson, who—who knew—became an expert on obscure historical figures while in prison. After that, we get into Potemkin cities and the open secret of those papier-mâché towns and “Peace Village” in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a place built for 200 people with parks for families that has no occupants but is nonetheless swept clean every morning. Herzog links that to The Truman Show and the Enron sham, where they had a dress rehearsal for employees to pretend like business was going great. We hop back and forth and forward and side to side through these moments to, I think, contextualize our current moment of ‘fake news.’ There’s a chilling account, too, of Jean-Bédel Bokassa having one of his political enemies killed and eating half of him, the other half kept in the freezer.

The Bokassa section of the chapter is an incredible historical anecdote. He fathered many children, and in particular a girl named Martine with a Vietnamese woman. As an adult, Martine showed up and was welcomed by her father as her favourite. However, after that, another girl named Martine from Vietnam came forward and announced that she was his real daughter—the first was a fake. Martine2 brought forward an artefact and some knowledge that only the real Martine could have. Bokassa ends up accepting both and married them both off the same day in identical wedding dresses…well, before arresting both husbands and putting them to death. In Herzog’s account, the details are hazy: it sounds like perhaps there was a conspiracy of one husband to kill the child of the opposing Martine. The fake Martine got “sent back to Vietnam” but the private plane was back within half an hour. The power of this story is haunting and absurd to me. It’s one of those situations where the truth is stranger than fiction.

With all this about “Fake News: A Brief History”, what is intriguing to me is that Herzog shows a great deal of restraint. There could easily be a genuine political argument here, a discourse about the value of authenticity or our power to accept delusions. And yet, we are just given stories. Stories with a great deal of evocative power, but without definitive conclusions. This, I believe to be Herzog’s thesis throughout: truth is not that which is objectively provable, but some deeper core.

Towards the end of the book, there is some more discussion of Herzog’s own film projects and the implication to me is clear that he’s drawing on a different conception of truth, one he describes as “ecstatic.” The power of film, and stories more generally, is to elevate us to this ecstatic truth that reveals to us something beyond that which is easily comprehended through the lens of fact. It’s an argument that we’ve likely heard before about fiction, but something about Herzog’s presentation allows The Future of Truth to embody that argument. It’s the resonant quality of the anecdotes, the evocative power of the vignettes, the tracing of a historical thread so thin that Constantinople and Mike Tyson can appear in the same sentence. A connective tissue.

Happy reading, truth seekers!