Sebald’s Exiles

Memory has forsaken me.

It was a dimly recalled memory that had me buy my first W.G. Sebald book, The Rings of Saturn. And, it turns out it was even misremembered, crediting the recommendation to X (no, I am not going all Kafka here, that’s her name) not Phil (sorry, Phil). Sebald has no such problems. His memory is as sharp and penetrating as Proust’s, and his writing is every bit as difficult and rewarding, which is saying a lot.

They are their own peculiar genre: parts biography, autobiography, history, and, I guess, part fiction. But it’s the “I guess” part that is the nubbin, for I am not sure since his writing weaves a peculiar web in which his musing over history are mixed with ramblings and memories, his and others’, that every attempt to extract yourself from the oddly melancholic mood only entangles you further.

There is very little, if any, direct dialogue; it is all reported speech; and it is here, that his technique is most rapturous.

Where Proust’s sentences wind around and knot themselves up, collecting assorted phrases along the way so that you lose the subject somewhere in the middle of the Gordian knot, nearly impossible to unravel, Sebald’s voice becomes nested dialogue, opening one reveals another which contains another, and the original voice which is Sebald’s, becomes the voice of someone within someone’s telling of a story within the narration of someone whom Sebald met and is reporting what he said.

But it all comes back to exile and abandonment and war and destruction and loss and art and creation. His are not minor themes nor are his memory and intellect and knowledge.
His writing may be unbelievably crisp even as he unrolls yet another gasping sentence, but it contains such a vast wealth of history and elucidations and deductions that it can take a few reading just to see the threads he is pulling and shaping, and believe me, he is since everything, but everything, binds and links tightly even if it there are millennia separating events. From ancient wars to artists from the middle ages to forgotten saints to, always, the Holocaust, man’s cruelty and genius is distilled from the most abstruse events.

Yet in the immense beauty of his creation there is the constant thrum of sorrow and despair. It would be too easy to declare it misanthropic, but Sebald is definitely not: he is numb with the sadness that results from seeing the crumbling decay of the world.

I have read all but one book, having just received three for Christmas, but still the most memorable is Austerlitz. Often great writing, no matter the subject, leave me elated even if a bit depressed: its beauty and majesty overriding the misery or horror. But Austerlitz left me feeling wounded and breathless for weeks after reading it – and its writing was stunning. It wouldn’t leave me. It haunted me, making me almost mute and catatonic.

I cannot make a higher recommendation.

Here is a small sample from one of his very first works, a poem which was finally translated and published posthumously, “After Nature” (Modern Library, 2003, p.28). This is a Stendhal moment.

The black bird that in its beak
carries a break-time meal
to St. Anthony on his site
in the desert may be the one with
the heart of glass, the bird
flying ever closer to us,
of which another prphet
of the last days announces
that it whill shit into the sea
so that the water boils itself out,
that the earth trembles and the great city
with the iron tower stands in flames,
whilst the Pope squats in a barge
and darkness comes and
with it a yellow dust
that covers the land.