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Title: The Glass Bees by Ernst Junger, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Mayer, Lousie Bogan ISBN: 0-374-52173-5 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: June, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A little surprise in store
Comment: When I imagined this book as I movie, I thought it would be like a futuristic movie set in the 1950's, with everything the same, the cars and clothes and hair, except for a few overdeveloped gadgets, a little bit like Minority Report. The gadgets are not attempts to master nature but very close imitations of nature, the Glass Bees of the title. They are unheimlich, to use a German word that I don't think Junger ever uses. The Zapparoni character reminded me more of Larry Ellison than Bill Gates, because Gates has a big house with lots of gadgets but Ellison transplanted an entire Japanese house and garden to America. Zapparoni shares the same Japanese perfectionism and fascination with miniatures. Junger also has some thoughts--very little happens in the book, which is almost a short story--on the connection between the perfection of technological means and dismemberment. Well worth reading.
Rating: 5
Summary: Millennium bugs
Comment: Captain Richard trained as a swashbuckling cavalry officer, but increasingly mechanised forms of warfare forced him to become a tank technician. Now, down on his luck after a life that reads like a radically compressed history of the twentieth century, he approaches the industrialist Zapparoni for a job. As the book came out in the 1950s and its author was born before the turn of the century, Zapparoni's products are called "robots" or "automata"; but they're a far cry from Asimov's Robots and Mechanical Men. As Bruce Sterling points out in his intriguing introduction, some passages from The Glass Bees, taken out of context, might easily have come from a computer magazine of the 1990s, blaring the wonders of miniaturisation and CD-ROM. The bulk of the novel comprises Richard's meditations before, during and after his interview with Zapparoni, and Junger's prescience is impressive not only in terms of the technology he envisages, but also in terms of its effect. Richard notes, for example, that the artificial bees' total efficiency in collecting nectar - not a drop left inside - will simply cause the flowers to die off through lack of cross-pollination. Written with brilliant and chilly clarity, and climaxing in an episode of restrained horror and terrifying ambiguity, The Glass Bees is an examination of the moral and cultural price of technology, from the perspective of a man who had seen plenty. However, although Sterling compares him with Celine, Junger is neither rancorous nor misanthropic. Indeed, despite the fact that Richard's wife is mentioned only a few times and never appears in person, the book is also a rather touching affirmation of human love.
Rating: 4
Summary: A prophecy that has already occured.
Comment: The Glass Bees is a short novel about power, technology and nature. It's also the story of a life; the life of a veteran german captain that has lived in two very different worlds: the "old" world where words like "courage" or "pride" still meant something and a "new" world where the words have lost their meaning, where the power of the State has almost been surrended to huge high-tech transnational firms and where efficency criteria leads the behaviour of most of the peolple. The story tells the way in which the old world's man tries (unsuccsesfully most of the times)to fit himself in the new world.
In my opinion The Glass Bees is an outstanding novel althoug -I have to say it- not one of the 10 best books I have ever read as another reviewer says.
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Title: Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945 by Thomas R. Nevin ISBN: 0822318792 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 by Ernst Junger ISBN: 0865274452 Publisher: Howard Fertig Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Details of Time: Conversations With Ernst Junger by Julien Hervier, Joachim Neugroschel, Ernst Junger ISBN: 0941419959 Publisher: Marsilio Pub Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: A Dubious Past: Ernst Junger and the Politics of Literature After Nazism (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 19) by Elliot Yale Neaman ISBN: 0520216288 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Stormtroop Officer on the Western Front by Ernst Junger, Basil Creighton ISBN: 0865274231 Publisher: Howard Fertig Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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