WG Sebald, 1995 (1998 in English translation) 296pp
This is a strange book. It says as much on the cover: this endorsement-warning from the Guardian newspaper on the very front of my 2002 paperback copy makes that clear from the very beginning. You have been warned.
Technically, this is fiction. It’s the account of a middle aged man’s walking holiday along the east coast of England in the 1990s. An unnamed narrator, recovering from a long illness, walks around rural Suffolk and gives us his thoughts, triggered in part by things he sees on his travels.
But this isn’t really a travelogue at all, or about our narrator. Or even fictional. It’s about … well what is this book about? I’m not sure there is a definitive answer for that. This makes for a tough book review of course, but here we go.
It’s about everything. At its heart, it’s a melancholic attempt - for these things can only ever be attempts, you can’t really succeed here - to capture the essence of the sheer folly of human nature. It’s a book about hubris, declines, decay, ruin. About how man’s endeavours start with the best of intentions and inevitably go wrong.
As an avid reader of non-fiction history, I truly learned, or started to understand, more about human nature from this book than anything else I’ve ever read. A powerful claim, but this is a powerful book. Its otherworldly, dreamy spell will linger, and follow you around. You may not be the same person you were before you read it; I’m not. This is a strange book.
Sebald employs a never-ending cascade of historical ideas and concepts to make this work. We open innocuously enough, but by the second page we are already getting diverted into another tangentially related topic by the narrator. And diverted. And diverted. We just keep getting distracted and run from idea to idea, vignette to vignette, seemingly at random.
That’s how we end up touching on Norwich’s silk industry and the finer details of the herring reproductive cycle, via Rembrandt.
I would think some people might find these repeated digressions annoying, and, if you really do, this book might not be for you. But unlike some other infamous examples from world literature, it’s manageable, and eminently readable. These digressions are how Sebald operates across his works, and for me at least they mirror a natural thought process.
Picture the scene: recovering from a lengthy hospital stay, you are walking through a fairly bleak post-industrial English seaside town that’s seen better days, and your mind begins to wander, and wander … perhaps it’s reflective of some inner turmoil, but you can’t just focus on one topic, you’re bouncing around, telling yourself or anyone who will listen stories within stories, like a matryoshka doll.
Sebald’s untimely death in 2001 at the age of 57 hovers over what is possibly the central mystery of the book: just who is the narrator, really? The book isn’t strictly autobiographical, but the narrator has an awful lot in common with Sebald, and even goes and visits some of Sebald’s real-life friends. He does this in his other books. We won’t ever be able to find out. This is a strange book.
Did he take the photos? Oh, yeah, the photos. Every couple of pages there is a photograph, sometimes only indirectly related to the text, but sort of in keeping with it all the same. These are objectively pretty bad photos by professional standards, especially in black and white reproduction in a paperback book, and definitely amateur. But they have that eerie authenticity that only a mediocre photo can bring.
These dreamy, lingering photos pull you through the book, and it is absolutely impossible to picture this book working without them.
Practically anything these days could be written by generative AI, but the curious torrent of historical fact, interspersed with seemingly relevant yet ultimately still random photos has an unreal, eerie, AI-like quality to it. Are all the facts true? Who took the photos?
This is a book you can read over and over again and have a different experience every time. What will stick with you is the melancholy, the elegaic rumination over a past we are doomed to repeat. It’s very easy and very difficult to read, and in fact impossible to adequately review. This is a strange book.