W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)

It has been many years since I read Sebald and I had forgotten how melancholy his writing is. That he is talented is without question. This recounting of the (fictional) lives of four German emigrants is almost unrelentingly depressing. The four stories that Sebald constructs are, for the most part, quite believable…even to the point of making me wonder on occasion if he isn’t simply telling non-fiction stories. But each one also has a few twists that struck me as not quite believable show more and reiterated that this is, in fact, fiction. Each story, in its way, addresses concerns of trauma and isolation, memory and belonging. I am not quite certain what it is about Sebald’s voice (in addition to his settings) that makes the overall effect so cheerless but I find it both consistent and compelling, in its way. One point that I think is essential to make is that the translation (into British, as opposed to U.S., English) is superb. I can’t read German and so have no way to compare but I find that Michael Hulse’s rendering is really quite extraordinary. show less

Nonostante sia stato scritto da un tedesco, è un libro molto inglese. Un Tre uomini in barca senza l'umorismo della famosa opera di Jerome, ma con la stessa maniacale attenzione ai dettagli, nel quale l'osservazione della natura porta a ricordi di ogni genere e a profonde meditazioni filosofiche.
E sarà perché il paesaggio nel quale si muove Sebald è una Est Anglia desolata, un luogo dimenticato da dio e dagli uomini, nel quale la natura dà ormai il peggio di sé e le rovine la fanno da show more padrone, che le meditazioni di Sebald toccano per la gran parte argomenti neri: la guerra contro il Terzo Reich col suo carico di distruzione, la storia di Conrad, dalla morte miseranda dei suoi genitori fino al suo incontro con la tenebra coloniale, la fine del Celeste impero in gran parte causata dall'ingordigia inglese e dal suo oppio. Eppure c'è una speranza che attraversa l'opera come un filo sottile, rappresentata dalla seta e dal suo umile artefice, il baco, indicata come l'unica strada che può riportare un paesaggio desolato a rivivere e l'umanità a ritrovare se stessa.
Insolito, molto profondo e molto interessante. show less

No ellipsis, no full stop, no new paragraph

For years I read and re-read Rings of Saturn and in the back of my mind was this idea that I should sit down next time and unpick a Sebald passage as the action, images and metaphors transition on the page. I wanted to work out the mechanics, the way he shifts the narrative, slipping in a new line of thinking while we the reader are busy absorbing another immediately before it. But catching a fleeting Sebald transition is like catching motes, tiny show more illuminations that in reality are the detritus of the world around us, cleaved off the forms that contained them, entering the next phase of of their existence as proof of the entropy around us. They form a portion of the world, Sebald reforms these entropies into narrative. Destruction and decline are all around.

If this were a poem, stretched out on the page differently, we would never question its form, but note its rhythms and shifts like poetry. But in prose, it mystifies many into looking for categories to define it. It's fiction, get over it. It's a novel as a string of images using what can be researched as history as the matter it builds itself from. Others write about relationships, their dynamics, the moral choices made in them. Here the relationships are with the landscape, what is known about it, found in it, and how it reflects the inner world of the narrator newly discharged from a hospital.

I always thought this book was kind of impossible to review. Partly because I was so in awe of it, partly because reading it was like going on a road trip, getting to the end, realising you really should go back because the trip was so good, without being clear why. And along the way, everything happens in a blur, equivalent to watching scenery going past on a highway at speed, unable to settle the eye on anything. Even though you take in all the words, images, ideas.

The actual road trip in the book is a walk in East Anglia – all travel, history, movement. But the road trip is the simple narrative form; a convention used by many writers. What we witness from our car window reading is a brief glimpse at the walker’s experiences of morbidity and his accompanying perception of mortality. The unnamed narrator must be a historian, full of the events and episodes from which to draw connections to the workings of his mind. We are in a sense being guided through that experience. The morbid state follows a hospital discharge, in the psychological literature this is a risky time, of vulnerability and likely emotional decline. In morbid states, what else can we do but think about our vulnerability. It is all encompassing. When depressed we think only of the worst aspects of ourselves and our surroundings reproduce it. So history and place transform into the metaphorical thoughts of morbidity for our unnamed narrator. Nothing is accidental when you’re in a state like this. It all fits an internal logic. Stumbling upon the ever degrading eastern coastline of England or the receded glory of Lowestoft is not an accident. The mind guides us to those places as they reflect the inner world. The narrator is on foot. He engages with his landscape through the slow methodical movement of walking. We do not. Reading is like driving in a Sebald novel, we are moving to a destination with many stops, but always in motion. It can appear disorienting. By the time we arrive, we have passed what we see.

But how does Sebald move us around the place? It keeps eluding me. Like trying to catch a herring or a sardine in my bare hands. There you go, herrings. Slipping that in there, herring was preceded by the word ‘like’. So you see how I produced that little simile on the page. But how does Sebald bring up herring? He has a lot to say about this once plentiful fish and its place in European commercial history.

Before there is a signpost, we are already there. We are travelling south from Lowestoft along the sea witnessing the slowly declining population of solitary beach fishermen camped for a day or a night under some desperately inadequate cover. The thoughts of the recently discharged narrator draw him into what he sees:

The fact is that today it is almost impossible to catch anything fishing from the beach.

The narrator connects to these desolate souls, echoing his own internal state:

They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

It wasn’t always like this. Emptiness and solitude give way to a brief history of abundance and a time when human industry tamed nature. The narrator muses that catches are getting smaller, toxins and chemicals pollute the catch so that even what is caught is not quite what it should be. Then the line mid paragraph:

It was not without reason that the herring was always a popular didactic model in primary school … of the indestructibility of nature.

Suddenly, we are introduced to the meaning of this metaphor – a period of growth and abundance. Abundance is like the experience before we are let down. Before our moribund state, we had power to influence. What does a herring metaphor for abundance look like?

…in 1857, that untold millions of herring rise from the lightless depths in the spring and summer months, to spawn in coastal waters and shallows, where they lie one on top of another in layers.

There is confidence and power in this 19thC surfeit. Until we find that there are so many herrings that tidal or wind change can bring so many into shore to beach themselves that the local people were unable to harvest enough of this glut that rots two feet deep for miles along the shore.

Waste, like the loss of our vitality perhaps gives rise to morbidity. A mishap, an accident, a force of nature renders us supine. Prey to our thoughts they feed on themselves.

Herring hold so many facets of meaning for a narrator carrying around thoughts of personal decline. The mental space of self-destructive thoughts mirrors the death of the herring:


Once the life has fled the herring, its colour changes. Its back turns blue, the cheeks and gills red, suffused with blood. An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet to altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays.

We can experience brief moments of life, or the appearance of life, even when we know our decline is coming. They can carry us for a while as though they are hope. But the moribund mind can’t accept hope for long.

We leave the herring, as we encountered them, contained in a parenthesis between thoughts of lonely fishermen seeking to catch what is not there, not caring about the catch, because caring would be to suffer.

I had long left the beach fishermen behind me when…

And so, Sebald has caught an idea and brought it out, trapped in a particular mental form, an idea within a state of mind reflecting itself over and over. Next we move to a great stone manor house in Henstead, and another parenthesis containing such thoughts. The landscape and the history contained within it will continue to reflect the interior of the narrator’s mind.

There is little warning when we arrive at the next image, metaphor, action, not even a paragraph. It’s as though we’ve sped past it in a car, and barely noticed. Yet strangely feel enriched by it. show less

This is the second time I’ve read this novel; the first time was soon after its publication in rh U.S. The book haunted me for reasons I couldn’t articulate. So, I thought it would be a good choice for my book club under the theme of “Memory." It proved to be the most controversial book in my three years of moderating this group.

The unnamed narrator is a man without a country, wandering through Europe studying architecture. In a railway station, he makes an acquaintance with a man who show more introduces himself as Austerlitz.

Sebald does away with plot, characterization, dialogue, and events leading to other events. What we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice.
Austerlitz is on a quest to find out who he is. What he recounts to the narrator is a reconstructive odyssey in search of himself. The two men encounter each other, seemingly by coincidence, again and again in their respective travels, always discussing architecture and history, but sharing nothing of their personal lives until 1996 when their conversation finally turns to Austerlitz’s life history.

The incredible power of this book is how Sebald tells the story and layers the subtext to a point that it requires re-reading with intense attention to every detail. Sebald combats the erasure of history on the collective level as well as the individual. What the Nazis take from Austerlitz is not his life or property but his essential personhood. The traumatic effects of separation are not felt by Austerlitz until the distractions of study and career are cleared away, exposing the emptiness of his disconnected, dislocated existence.

The photographs, unannotated throughout, are part of what makes this novel so powerful and haunting, perhaps because photographs are so evocative and unaffected by the passage of time—except for the fading. The photos give us the impression of a memoir, but some of them have no connection to the prose, yet we, as the reader, are always looking for the pattern. The Nocturama and its accompanying photos of the monkey, the owl, Wittgenstein, and another man set the tone for the conceit of fake realities, which include the false reality of Austerlitz’s own childhood, the horrific distortion of reality by the Nazis, and the false universe of the Holocaust. Sebald says, “This recourse to peripherality (the photographs) arises partly as a narrative strategy to cope with the inherent unrepresentability of that which occurred in the Nazi concentration camps.”

Central to understanding this novel is the reader's understanding that Sebald is German but not Jewish. He is the narrator; he is not Austerlitz. He writes as he does to cope with the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded him growing up in Germany. His father worked in the Nazi machine. Sebald’s conviction: “This is not so much a way of understanding the Holocaust, so much as it is a way of making us think about how we can’t understand the Holocaust.” This book is a combination of memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography. show less