[In the following excerpt, McGonigle asserts that in Eumeswil "Jünger is concerned solely with attempting to answer the question: How is one to live?"]

… Ernst Jünger's Eumeswil is the distillation of its author's search for a basis upon which to build a life of integrity so as to survive the ever-present totalitarian temptations.

Still little known in America, Jünger, who will be 100 years old next year, may be Europe's most important living writer. Bringing the authority of his career and life to everything he writes, he has been able to fulfill two-thirds of the famous prescription of Baudelaire: "There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create."

During the First World War, Jünger fought in the frontline trenches, was seriously wounded seven times and awarded the Pour le Merite, the German equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Storm of Steel, a memoir based on his wartime experiences, may be the greatest, and the most disturbing, war book ever written—for it is not a complaint against war's futility but rather a celebration of the exhilaration Jünger felt in the heat of combat.

After the war Jünger was involved in irregular conflicts that lasted into the early 1920s. He studied biology and pursued entomological research as well as publishing a number of books that predicted the rise of an inhuman technological society and the death of both the individual and personal heroism. Astonishingly, in 1938 in Germany he published a popular and biting anti-Nazi parable, On the Marble Cliffs.

Recalled to the army at the outbreak of the Second World War, Jünger served in Paris, where he was an unofficial liaison between the German army and world of French intellectuals. He was implicated in the plot against Hitler's life, but a letter has come to light, signed by Hitler himself, forbidding any harassment of Jünger by the Gestapo. After the war Jünger refused to submit to the Allied de-Nazification process on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi. The communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, in a neat act of symmetry, wrote a letter in Jünger's defense.

Since the war Jünger has published a series of visionary novels (three of which have appeared in translation. The Glass Bees, Aladdin's Problem and A Dangerous Encounter), an extensive diary that is a perennial bestseller in France, entomological research papers, volumes of travel writings and a book recounting his experiences under LSD administered by his friend Albert Hofmann, the inventor of the drug.

There are no books in the American literary tradition like Eumeswil, which only by default can be described as a novel. Foregoing plot, Jünger is concerned solely with attempting to answer the question: How is one to live?

Composed, we eventually learn, of the secret writings of a young night steward in the household of The Condor, the ruler of Eumeswil, a decaying authoritarian city-state, the book is a compilation of overheard anecdote, ruminations on the different types of despotism and reflections on a wide range of interests—from the decay of language, to the relations between the sexes and right on to the ideal diet:

I am unconcerned with how people judge me; but how shall I stand the test of my self-criticism? It is hard when a man summons himself to the bar…. It makes no difference to me whether Eumeswil is ruled by tyrants or demagogues. Any man who swears allegiance to a political change is a fool…. The most rudimentary step toward freedom is to free oneself from all that.

Jünger pulls the reader into his book with the disquieting power of anecdotes:

Once in Peru, I participated in a ritual fiesta that involves the sacrifice of a condor. It always takes place in February. These people are truculent; though worshipping the bird as a god, they slowly torture it to death. More than anything else, however, the condor is kept for a bullfight. First, they let it starve for a week; then they tie it, like a rider to the back of the bull, which has been stabbed bloody with lances. The populace is thrown into a paroxysm while the condor with outspread wings rips the mighty animal to pieces.

By entrusting the narrative to a 29-year-old, Jünger avoids any easy dismissal of his work as being the thoughts of a grumpy old man. The impersonation of the earnest informed young voice allows us a sympathetic identification.

Reading Eumeswil one wonders whether Jünger's imagination will give way to some sort of cheap science fiction resolution. But readers of this book will find that it finally brings them face to face with cold objective actuality: The fact that "At bottom, everyone is solitary, poor, and 'only' in the world."