Sebald
I was given WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as a birthday present almost thirty years ago, started it but didn’t get on with it. The book ended up languishing on my shelves until, somehow, I lost it. I had a vague sense there was unfinished business attaching to it. In 2019 I picked up Die Ausgewanderten from a second-hand book store almost as an act of reparation for negligence. These past few days I have read it at last, with a depth of emotion no book has provoked in me for a long time. Anything I might say about it sounds trite even before words are uttered. The beauty of Sebald’s prose is almost unbearable; the brittleness of the destinies he draws is affecting. The reader feels entrusted with a treasure of immense significance in the light of which his own life demands to be reread. Perhaps I needed all this time of waiting to be ready. Mark O’Connell has observed that reading Sebald is ‘a wonderfully disorienting experience’. I’d say it is no less an experience that might lead you home.
