On 'Ghost Pains'

Introducing Tess Lewis’s translation of On the Marble Cliffs, Ernst Jünger’s metaphysical fable of impending apocalypse, Jessi Jezewska Stevens suggests the primary engine of that book’s power, as well as its driving insight, is the coincidence of deep internal contradictions and an elegant, even sumptuous exterior. It is a work of crystalline beauty, but beneath the narrative’s “icy polish” and the stillness of the fantastically rarefied world it describes, a frenzy of directionless violence awaits, free of constraining or clarifying principles and virtues, leading only to an abyss. In Ghost Pains, Stevens’s new collection of short stories, that subterranean chaos seems to have woven itself into the fabric of the quotidian, even at its most orderly and refined; the final reckoning may be forestalled, but the waiting itself has become the terror, the catastrophe of life just going on.