You will find a grandiosity and grandiloquence in the films of Werner Herzog that you will also find in his memoir, Every man for himself and God against all. I do not think that anyone else in the 21st century could write such a book without people thinking it the height of pretentiousness and egomania.
For example, there's a chess grandmaster from the early 20th century named Bogoliubov. Chess players are fond of this quote of his: "When I win playing the white pieces it is because I am playing with the white pieces. But when I win playing the black pieces it is because I am Bogoliubov!" Herzog can write his memoir laden with Beowulf-level grandiosity and grandiloquence because he is Hertzog.
See what I did there in that last paragraph? That's what Herzog does throughout the book. He writes about some guy he knew as a child or who did something or other. The story does not sound anything at all related to Herzog's life or work. You wonder, what's the point? Why am I reading about someone who carved faces with strange expressions on trees in the mountain forest for hikers to stumble upon and how does this have anything to do with Herzog? Keep reading. Herzog takes us on many of these long, at first inexplicable, digressions and side trips. But then he does tie everything together eventually. Well, almost everything.
Herzog's writing style reminds me of Daniel Pinkwater's father. Pinkwater wrote many children's books and made regular contributions to NPR's All Things Considered radio programs. In one of these radio segments, he speaks of his father who grew up in the part of Eastern Europe that has people speaking all manner of dialects of various languages. Pinkwater's father never learned to speak any one language properly. Accompanying his Dad on a trip to Poland once, he watched his father baffle and entertain those he spoke to by speaking Russian, Polish, or German, but not really. As Pinkwater put it, "Whatever language he was ostensibly speaking, you understood what my father said, but you didn't know how."
Reading Herzog's autobiography is a lot like that.
