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Sunday 7 September 2008

A master shrouded by mist

For all his deliberate pace and discursive method, Sebald does pull you along in an almost hypnotic fashion. And that is a great virtue. Yet I wonder about the profundity. Reading him, even going quite slowly, I get more a sensation of glancing or skimming rather than of being dragged deeper into things. Even his most memorable images and encounters leave behind an impression that tends to be sketchy and evanescent. For one thing, these carefully oblique reflections on the horrors of our time draw much of their material and their force from first-hand accounts of them that are plainer and more direct, such as the poet H. G. Adler’s recollections of Theresienstadt, not to mention Primo Levi’s of Auschwitz.

One cannot help noticing too the calculated efforts to tug at the reader’s heartstrings. The most blatant examples are the smudged black-and-white photos with which he peppers his peregrinations: pictures of deserted factories, peeling doorways, long-dead relatives in old-style clothes or fancy dress. These fragile shards of the past, to pastiche the Sebaldian style, remind me rather of those short-lived editions of old Dennis Wheatley crime mysteries which came fully equipped with a used book of matches, a piece of bloodstained cloth, a crumpled feather and other clues stuck into their pages to stimulate the sluggish imagination. I cannot help feeling that this kind of Shardenfreude is as crude as the methods employed in what Sebald would no doubt call, in his old-fashioned way, a housemaid’s novelette.

Certainly it would be unfair to judge Sebald on the strength of Campo Santo, which is a collection of posthumous leavings: four little sections from a never completed book on Corsica, half a dozen literary essays, mostly on German writers such as Kafka and Peter Handke, and a few final morsels on subjects as diverse as mackerel, Sebald’s early musical experiences and Bruce Chatwin and the collector’s instinct. Beginners should start instead with Austerlitz or The Emigrants.

At the same time, precisely because these are scraps and sketches, not fully finished, something worrying does begin to show through the thin, unvarnished texture. And that something is banality.

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