NYRB, January 2023

Now in a new translation, an imaginative, darkly radiant fable about a pair of brothers, formerly warriors, whose idyll is shattered by an encroaching fascistic force.

Set in a world of its own, Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs is both a mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism.
The narrator of the book and his brother, Otho, live in an ancient house carved out of the great marble cliffs that overlook the Marina, a great and beautiful lake that is surrounded by a peaceable land of ancient cities and temples and flourishing vineyards.
To the north of the cliffs are the grasslands of the Campagna, occupied by herders. North of that, the great forest begins. There the brutal Head Ranger rules, abetted by the warrior bands of the Mauretanians.
The brothers have seen all too much of war. Their youth was consumed in fighting. Now they have resolved to live quietly, studying botany, adding to their herbarium, consulting the books in their library, involving themselves in the timeless pursuit of knowledge.
However, rumors of dark deeds begin to reach them in their sanctuary. Agents of the Head Ranger are infiltrating the peaceful provinces he views with contempt, while peace itself, it seems, may only be a mask for heedlessness.

Praise for On the Marble Cliffs

The classical beauty of the writing, in Tess Lewis’s exquisite translation, gives a sense of the author’s sympathies. Sam Sacks WSJ

Ernst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German literature… Tess Lewis’s new translation is undeniably superior. In its care for cadences and more precise renderings of even basic words—in the enrapturing first sentence of the novel she translates Schwermut as “melancholy,” whereas Hood inexplicably reaches for “grief”—her work supersedes her predecessor’s on every score. Harpers

With Europe facing a resurgence of neo-fascism, the publication of a fresh English translation of Ernst Jünger’s fictional masterpiece On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen) feels timely. Tess Lewis has admirably conjured the lustre of the imageladen prose that lends Jünger’s novella its distinctive visionary quality. TLS

The translator, Tess Lewis, is a much-honored practitioner of a difficult craft. She is admirably alert to this unusual novel’s nuanced shades of meaning, figures of speech, and implicit as well as explicit symbolism… Jünger’s book had obvious significance in 1939, at a time when the globe was about to be engulfed in wars that pitted fascism against democracy. For decades, many believed that the age of despotism was long past. But the current rise of populist demagogues and autocrats, promising a better world — if we only abandon notions of rights, individual liberties, and respect for minorities — proves otherwise. History appears to be surreal: maintaining liberty in the face of totalitarian fantasy calls for vigilance. Jünger’s cautionary tale may be more resonant now than when it was first published. The Arts Fuse

An appealing introduction from Jessi Jezewska Stevens offers two credible and conflicting interpretations (either it’s an anti-fascist anthem or a “retreat into aesthetics”), but while Jünger (1895–1998) beautifully portrays the narrator’s nostalgia for a simpler life, readers will likely feel unmoored by the hazy details of what’s going on. Fans of European classics will want to take a look at this curiosity. PW

What it is wholly, though, is a remarkable and rewarding piece of literature, in prose often poetic and lyrical that evokes a fantastic world partly resembling our own partly something other, something unclassifiable… Like the simple things whose loss the narrator laments on the book’s opening page, On the Marble Cliffs presents “a cornucopia of riches.” Open Letters Review

On the Marble Cliffs stands as the most prominent of all the fictional works ever written by Jünger. Published in the fateful year of 1939, this novel has been recently rendered into English by Tess Lewis in a superb translation that accurately captures the novel’s rich, nuanced, evocative, and at times symbolic and esoteric language. The Massachusetts Review

If an English language reader wants to make their way through this book, it absolutely has to be this edition. A Green Man Review

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