The first section of this book recreates a performance by Klaus Kinski in Germany in 1971. He performed a one-man show about Christ the Saviour. Kinski was the star of many Werner Herzog films and their fractious relationship is worth a book of its own. He was a wild, creative force of nature; a man with serious mental health issues. A man who left a litany of sexual abuse accusations. He died in 1991 aged 65. Kinski had a huge ego and obviously identified with Christ.
The opening section is a virtuoso performance by Myers; he uses the framework of the live performance, and an imagined internal monologue, to revisit Kinski’s biography. There is a fragmentation of thought that captures Myers’s imagined version of Kinski’s mind. There are a number of photos – the same photo repeated on different scales – that effectively capture this fragmentation. By the last few pages of this section words themselves are scattered on the page. The disintegration is brilliantly illustrated.
With the second section we are in meta territory, Geoff Dyer land, as we join Myers as he writes the book. The initial transition to this section is refreshing but becomes a bit plodding after the intensity of Kinski’s theatrics. The book, as he himself writes, is “...becoming about the writer himself, even though his life was entirely comprised of writing, walking, and looking at sleet and bird feeders. - And who wants to read that?”
Indeed.
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Myers wonders at his obsession with Kinski’s performance of the play, endlessly dissecting it on YouTube. He draws a tenuous connection between his own creative self-sabotage and Kinski’s but whereas Kinski constantly teeters on the edge of a breakdown, Myers ends up buying a nicer house than the one he was living in at the beginning of the book.
When he returns to Kinski in section three, there is a sense of repetition – more insults, more mad internal monologue. He’d already captured it brilliantly in the first section but here the further word fragments don’t seem as believable.
I’d recommend this book for the first section alone.
Kevin Gildea is a writer, comedian and actor
