The German actor’s real-life meltdown is the springboard for this compelling autofictional account, in which the author sets out to write about Kinski during lockdown
A show-stealing villain in spaghetti westerns and slasher flicks with titles such as Schizoid and Psychopath, the German actor Klaus Kinski – “a demented Teutonic version of Dennis Hopper”, as one tribute had it – is known best for his testy collaboration with Werner Herzog, whose 1982 film Fitzcarraldo put Kinski in the title role, lugging a steamship over the Andes. A terror on set as well as on screen, he was offered a part in Indiana Jones but told Steven Spielberg the Raiders of the Lost Ark script was a “pile of shit”.
Benjamin Myers’s new novel plunges us into Kinski’s fevered mind during one of his last performances, a recorded solo stage show in West Berlin in 1971, where he delivered a ferocious monologue as Jesus, “the freest and most modern of men, who preferred to be massacred than rot alive with all the others”. Showcased in a documentary released in 2008 by Peter Geyer, the act descended into chaos, Kinski arguing with hecklers before ending his monologue in a near-empty auditorium.
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