[In the following review, Lotozo praises Jünger's Aladdin's Problem.]

He has been recognized as one of the great figures of 20th-century German letters, yet after more than 70 years and 50 books the work of Ernst Jünger—who is still writing at the age of 97—remains largely untranslated into English. A political philosopher who is difficult to categorize, Mr. Jünger is best known for his futuristic novels, including The Glass Bees, Eumeswil, Heliopolis and On the Marble Cliffs, which was published in 1942, while its author was serving as a captain in the German Army. An allegorical attack on the Nazi Government, On the Marble Cliffs somehow eluded the censors and went on to become an international best seller.

In Aladdin's Problem, a novel that was published in German in 1983, Mr. Jünger sticks to the present and offers more metaphysics than politics. The narrator is Friedrich Baroh, a 37-year-old East German Army deserter who has fled to the West. Employed as a funeral director in a prosperous firm owned by his uncle, Baroh—with the help of his friend Kornfeld—dreams up a bizarre but wildly successful venture: Terrestra, a vast, international, ecumenical necropolis located in Turkey, which offers graves guaranteed for eternity. To his surprise, Baroh discovers that he has aroused a "primal instinct," a desire for some sense of permanence amid the planet's endless upheavals. Very soon, business is booming.

Baroh tells his story in a digressive, allusive, ironic monologue that combines autobiographical details—touching, for example, on his increasingly distant marriage and his aristocratic roots—with musings on such topics as nihilism, the ahistorical modern world, U.F.O.'s, the myth of progress, the absence of angels and the death of the gods, funerary rituals as emblems of culture and the problem of "power with its delights and dangers." (Think of Milan Kundera without the eroticism and you've got an idea of Mr. Jünger's aphoristic style.)

Despite his success as a capitalist, all does not seem to work out for Baroh. In fact, as the novel progresses it appears that he may be going mad. ("Given the sinister way in which our world is changing," he remarks, "almost everybody ought to be familiar with this mood, in which one begins to doubt rationality.") Then again, Baroh might be in the midst of a transforming spiritual experience, heralded by an otherworldly messenger called Phares.

A scholarly afterword by Martin Meyer suggests that Mr. Jünger has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But you needn't bone up on Swedenborgian notions of spirit and matter to enjoy the wry humor and tersely poetic language in Joachim Neugroschel's graceful English translation of Aladdin's Problem. Readers will be stirred by its persistent and intriguing questions about the conflicts between nature and technology, the individual and the state, and by its examination of humanity's place in this wasteland of a world that we are rapidly creating.