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Friday 5 December 2008

Campo Santo

A master shrouded by mist

Jacques Austerlitz is a Czech Jew who is brought over as a small child on a Kindertransport and brought up by a grim minister and his desperate wife in the slatiest reaches of north Wales to know nothing of his origins and to call himself Dafydd Elias. The passage that Sebald and Anthea Bell read describes his escape from this deadly couple into the outlandish delights of his school friend’s home, Andromeda Hall, with its eccentric uncles, its moths and cockatoos and carrier pigeons and its heartstopping views of the Mawddach estuary. These are among the most vivid and poignant pages Sebald ever wrote. The paradox is that they are also the closest to conventional fiction.

By contrast, Sebald’s more openly autobiographical wanderings sometimes exude, to me at least, a curious offputting tang, rather like a whiff of disinfectant blowing into a concert hall. Whether he is in East Anglia or Belgium or the Black Forest, the W. G. figure, as we might call him, trudges disconsolately through unvisited museums and down-at-heel zoos, eats solitary and usually vile meals in grimy railway refreshment rooms and out-of-season resorts, alternately disheartened by the irremediable decay and the brash vulgarity that he finds everywhere. Always he sees the legions of the dead flocking around him, and in his frequent bouts of paralysis and depression the hard edge of things appears to flicker and fade until it begins to merge with the ghosts of the past. He embarks on these low-spirited excursions for reasons that he tells us he cannot recall, sometimes to escape from difficulties in his life that he finds too painful to rehearse.

This anonymous being seems to correspond in many particulars to Professor Sebald of UEA. Yet he is, as it were, disembodied and free to float among his ghosts. In his estrangement from the material world and its inhabitants, both usually depicted as coarse and gross, W. G. is of course the epitome of the modern writer, which is partly why so many modern writers find him so irresistible and discern in his writing a depth of focus which makes other treatments of the sufferings of the 20th century and the Holocaust in particular seem superficial.

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