The Sebald Fiction Poll

i think i read rings of saturn first, so i might have to say that. just cuz that was the first time i had come into contact with his particular brand of genius. but i like all the books for similar reasons. you know? also, weirdly, i can't remember much about any one book. all i know is when i was reading them i was totally engaged and riveted by his technique and his voice.

I'm in the same position. If asked which book hangs together best as a novel, I'd say Austerlitz.

Reluctantly revealing myself as a hopeless philistine in the matter of Sebald, or at least the Rings of Saturn. All sorts of things annoyed me about it. I disliked his self-conscious nervous friability, to the point of comic feebleness. Like in the hospital at the beginning or when he claims he got lost in a labyrinth (a visual reproduction of which reveals that a child of five couldn't have got lost in it).

The thematic association of elements that goes to make up the structure results in a meaningless saturation of eclectic information. Prose style is sometimes frown-inducingly rotten.

There's a lot more I'm afraid, I wrote a very long rant about it while I was reading it, but sensibly refrained from putting it up anywhere thank God, especially since for all that I disliked it, I rather enjoyed The Rings of Saturn as a sort of informal gazetteer of an area of England I have a lot of affection for. The criticisms I had seemed over the top, and in some ways were addressed more to the reverence in which he is held by some people - especially the critics quoted on the back of my copy.

I must read Austerlitz however, and the fact that everyone seems to disagree suggests that I am probably 'wrong' (if that means anything here).

i think i just liked being hypnotized by his books. they kinda put me in a trance.

I'm ok w/trance-like -- but I reckon Ballard (to pick a random example) is trance-like and manages to work up a hidden alchemy within that happens to tie some of the strands together. I've yet to find that when I read Sebald.

So A Natural History of Destruction is the only ones of his which I liked an awful lot. That, also, is an essay collection which actually has a central point...

i loved austerlitz. i think? i found rings of saturn a bit, dunno, formless in its digressions and ultimately a bit pointless (for me). most of the time i had no idea why he was telling me what he was telling me and what that was supposed to mean. it's refreshing to be so completely at a loss about the actual point of a book - both while reading it and afterward - and i find the prose always lovely and precise (so GamalielRatsey's comment surprises me) and, yes, hypnotic. will read more for sure but i'm voting austerlitz.

also i suppose it's worth asking whether any of this is actually fiction?

"The thematic association of elements that goes to make up the structure results in a meaningless saturation of eclectic information."

i agree with this to an extent, however, i'm pretty sure there's always more going on than most readers can decipher & certainly much more than i can.

that strikethrough was meant to be an underline.

"The thematic association of elements that goes to make up the structure results in a meaningless saturation of eclectic information."

"a bit, dunno, formless in its digressions"

I don't agree although both these views I think rightly focus on the essential feature of the book itself - cf. one of the epigraphs:

"The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect"

Sebald is super and RoS is the greatest of his greats.

Another vote for Rings of Saturn. Digressive, eclectic, associative, that's all true-- and also trancelike, haunted. Like the quote at the top of the page. All his books seem sad, and yet when I think of RoS I want to reread it, to be on that walk with him, through the marshes, thinking of... whatever
As for the point of all his books mentioned here-- aren't they all about being German of a certain generation, and shame (trying to come to terms with it, or get beyond it, or at least air it out)? They're all about the war, and what lingers of it

I think that's a huge part of it. Another vote for RoS, with Austerlitz a close second.

Out of interest I dug out the notebook where I'd written down my feelings on reading The Rings of Saturn. I don't think I'd agree with the tone now - mainly because there is so much to enjoy in the book (although the bits I enjoy tend to be the straightforward historical bits - guidebook stuff) -

When he starts asking sundry nurses and receptionists for 17th Century scientist Thomas Browne's skull in the hospital where it is supposed to be kept and where coincidentally Sebald has been admitted for 'total immobility' (causes unstated) he tells us,
'Not only did they stare at me in utter incomprehension when I voiced my strange request, but I even had the impression that some of those I asked thought of me as an eccentric crank'

No way.

[Of the maze -]

Either Sebald is lying or he is so mentally enfeebled by his hypersensitive imagination that he is unable to perform the most basic of everyday tasks. This feebleness produces moments of unintentional comedy, such as when he starts absent-mindedly walking round in circles near Dunwich.

I suppose we may need such hypersensitive sorts to perceive things that normal people cannot, but it seems rather like a condition where colours are seen too vividly to make proper sense of the world around. The perspective is wrong, misleading, the proportions distorted.

'The great pain of separation, Frederick recalled, was with me for a long time, especially before going to sleep or when I was tidying my things'

I suppose a willing soul would say the obscurity of this sentence represents one of the book's hidden themes; the osmosis between the self, the environment and other people within it so that each disperses and is lost in the other, that others' recollections become yours and vice versa, meaning all experience becomes as a whole: uninterrupted by divisive and destructive concepts such as the self or narrative time, a redemption of the nature of experience (and the the presence of events like Belsen). But it feels more like bad writing.

(The picture of Belsen is not labelled. WHY? Is it some pissy notion related to the conjectured one outlined above of trying to decontextualise photo, to make it part of the [can't read this word] chiarascuro/light and shade of the text - a single experience? PUNISH.)

Incidentally, the method by which Sebald introduces Belsen is illuminatingly cackhanded, and the reader would perhaps take it as a deliberate though inexplicable guying of his general method of association, were it not for the gravity of the subject: he has gone out for a walk whereupon 'great cumulous clouds brewed up out of the west casting a grey shadow upon the earth. Perhaps it was the darkening that called to my mind [...] Major George Wyndham Le Strange [...] who served in the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp at Bergen Belsen on the 14th of April 1945.'

He seems to me deliberately obscure, to have a rather high-handed mandarin attitude towards the reader - unlabelled photos, refers to Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, but doesn't name it, why so coy?

The book is full of little nuggets of history - and it is here that it has its greatest interest - when he packs his monstrous ego away and discourses interestingly and lucidly on diverse matters.

So why the savagery? I would have liked this book had I found it mouldering away in the back of a second-hand bookshop. The gushing. The critical praise on the back of the book makes me 'irritated to the point of fear'

'A desperate intensity of feeling is thrillingly counterpoised by the workings of a wonderfully learned and rigorous mind'

That 'desperate intensity of feeling' is horrible, but also true, which is horrible. Is it 'thrillingly counterpoised'? or even 'rigorous'?

'Sebald is surely a major European author... he reaches heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust' (groan).

If you heard this sentence spoken by someone in a pub, it would be followed shortly by the sound of the bolt sliding into place across the door and a group of grim-faced drinkers easing themselves heavily off their bar stools patting fists in open palms as a prelude to some hard learning. 'Epiphanic beauty' indeed. I suppose Proust may approach this but it seems hard lines to call his astonishing ability to harmoniously combine [punctilises?] attention to the minutiae of existence, both the material and immaterial, into the epic rhythms and swells of human existance. 'Exquisite' suggests a willingness to pull punches at the expense of unflattering description and this emphatically he does not do - his satiric eye as sharp as ice in Hell.

where Sebald trims his observations to fit his aesthetic.

The hand-wringing love of the over-sensitive.

The criticism is disproportionate, but I'm still happy with the essential criticism - that in the Rings of Saturn his desire for an aesthetic causes him to fudge his observation of the world around him, to subsume it to his personality, which feels like a lie, because of the points where you can see the concealment.

He got a revenge of sorts - over Christmas I went for a long walk to Dunwich, but had left it so late I got completely lost in the dark.

Oh, I'm not sure I buy that rings of Saturn thing - or rather I buy it, but saying it's the point doesn't, for me, justify the point.

i wish i could comment more. i need to read these books again. they FEEL like a dream to me now. or a ghost story someone told me a long time ago. something almost gothic about all that rambling around all those ghost towns. the Dunwich horror!

i didn't read Vertigo, though i think it's considered his relatevely worst novel.
RoS - gonna read very soon, really looking forward to it.
Between Austerlitz and Emigrants - the first is a better, more complex effort than the latter (which is also magnificent) - Emigrants is kinda dry and laconic compared to Austerlitz, which has take the techniques even further, into an unstable, haunted, twisted world, which is seen through subjective glasses that carry the weight of the past and the guilt of the heroine.
i mostly remember the original perspective about architecture, and how it is seen now, compared to it's original uses in the past, how everything that supposed to be "in order" actually creates chaos.
and Sebald transforms it to it's writing style in a very unique way.

for me,reading Sebald at first, was like reading someone who managed to create to perfect combination between Bernhard,Nabokov and Borges, and yeah, the effect on the reader is totally trance-like.

I think Sebald namedropped Poe as an influence..
xpost

Couple of thoughts: I don't think any of the humour in Sebald is unintentional - I think he's very dry and droll, and very self-aware. Calling him pretentious seems like missing the point. He never pretended to be anything other than an introspective academic, and never, never talked down to his audience.

Fair enough - I certainly need to read more to get a feeling as to whether he's companionable. What I wrote above came from approaching Rings of Saturn with a feeling of great sympathy, ready to like it, and finding it rebarbative and irritating - will approach the next I read softly, softly. I certainly don't want to argue myself into a corner where he becomes inaccessible.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

for me,reading Sebald at first, was like reading someone who managed to create to perfect combination between Bernhard,Nabokov and Borges

Well, now I'm going to have to read me some Sebald, Zeno!

his casual unpretentious erudition definitely reminds me of Borges. which is why GamalielRatsey's complaints make no sense to me.

(also annoyed because this

He seems to me deliberately obscure, to have a rather high-handed mandarin attitude towards the reader - unlabelled photos, refers to Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, but doesn't name it, why so coy?

that last sentence was a shambles but the bottom line is, I can't imagine anyone getting angry over his books. they're slow-moving, thoughtful, introspective, harmless. it's like going to the beach in April and then getting upset that it's too cold to swim.

wish i had voted in this--would have given it to the emigrants, which i found more moving than any of the others.

Sebald does name "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis" but doesn't give the author, just refers to it being written in Uruguay or some such. I did think there was an element of obscurity about this bit when i read it.

his casual unpretenious erudition definitely reminds me of Borges

For me, I find him more someone trying to be like Borges, but with the brevity or compressed wit, which tends to produce part of the irritation.

I'm not sure I find him patronising, as I say, I just find him slightly high-handed.

Apologies for the (slight) misreading, I didn't have the book on me and was going off my barely legible notes - my gripe was with not saying who the author was.

As I say, I think my reaction was over the top.

And I get into that mood where I feel the need to fight my corner with slightly more vim than is perhaps warranted - troll mode I suppose.

Actually even as I type this I find my heart beating dangerously quickly, and my mind teetering on the brink of fist-slamming mode, saying 'Hell! I'll be damned for a Dutchman if I'm going to...'

So I think I should stop there, especially since saying 'no, no, no' gets a little boring and unproductive after a while.

i dont think its an unreasonable or weird criticism that youre making! in fact it makes total sense to me—if you dislike sebald (or rather "sebald" i.e. the narrator), personally (which is at least part of what youre saying, right? unless im misreading you?), or at the very least find him irritating, well then, the books arent going to be for you at all!

because, you know, i kind of dont disagree with your assessment of him. i just happen to like him, and not really mind the eccentric pretentiousness, the "friability" etc. or even find in those qualities reasons to like him (this may have something to do w/ what you were saying about having a different feeling finding the book in a dusty corner of a secondhand shop, which is close enough to how i found the emigrants)...

finished the rings of Saturn thinking "well the others are meant to be better i guess ..."

thank you for listing all of the facts about silk that you know, wally gordon sebald

Thought rings of saturn was great, happy to read random facts about silkworms, late chinese empire, conrad, weird people he met in ireland once. The travelogue and melancholic/ironic aspect put me in mind of Robinson in Space, after which I couldn't help but read it in Paul Scofield's voice - maybe that contributed to my enjoyment. It was wilfully obscure in places but that only really annoyed me once or twice, in particular when he was visiting his friend michael hamburger and started going on about holderlin, about whom i know nothing anyway, in a way that was obviously extremely tied up with hamburger's thoughts and feelings, about which i know less than nothing, have no desire to know about, and wouldn't know where to go looking if i did. Otherwise i thought the obscurity contributed to a somewhat dreamlike quality.

1. This is a story about the most courteous act of hostility I've ever witnessed. This came from the author W.G. Sebald.

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) September 5, 2017

That's a great story. Sebald is one of those authors I feel I should like more than I do...

i just realized that i read that the other day thinking it was about thomas bernhard

Lol

Ben Lerner's review of the recently published Sebald biog in the NYRB was great btw. Certainly seems more worthwhile than the book.

The only one I've read (so far!) is Austerlitz, the edition with James Wood's handy intro (he's also got a couple of Sebald commentaries on lrb and newyorker). Looking at the takes on other books here, I suspect he's even more self-aware here, deliberately putting (most of) his own persona/voice in the narrator's occasional encounters with the long and winding, musically associative, gradually and compulsively accruing momentum of Austerlitz the outsider pilgrim---results: beautiful (go A. go). What a swan song.

Putting most of it in the narrative-within-the narrative, I mean, as in Heart of Darkness.

thought this would be about - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/w-g-sebald-speak-silence-carol-angier/620180/

Though Oyler talks about her problems with Sebald in the first place she also makes the biography sound appalling.

I spent three months and several hundred euros trying to like Sebald. @Harpers is reimbursing me for the latter, but in the course of the former several men I know suffered irreparable emotional damage https://t.co/gwGxAN9Bhy

— Lauren Oyler (@laurenoyler) November 15, 2021

Just started Rings of Saturn. Intriguing

Just finished Rings Of Saturn. I found its ambiguous fictionality distracting and its fleeting observations on death and impermanence to be at times overly ephemeral, but his extended riffs on eg the stately home in Ireland, or Swinburne, were delicious and haunting in their own right. How you say - a wunderkammer, with the silken remnants of its covering-cloth still intermittently visible.

god the innumerable ways lauren oyler is bad

I was reading the book already, because my friend spends much time on the Suffolk coast and had persuaded me to do so along with him; it is also a book that my girlfriend was able to lend me, having also read it relatively recently. Having finally completed it, do I find myself now tasked with reading a lengthy critique of the writer, which appears to begin with a to-scale parody?

if you like the extended riffs, the ones in austerlitz are even more elegaic imo.

The parody shouldn't have been there, but once she gets down to it I can see why I didn't entirely get on with Sebald (apart from his book of essays) a long time ago now.

Thank you - I shall definitely read it.

Even if I customarily prefer my extended riffs laced with antic absurdity or satire (the latter half of The Last Samurai makes for an intriguing companion perhaps, no matter how unfair it is to put DeWitt's monument under the same looking-glass as any other poor piece of fiction), the sheer memento mori of TROS had a particular sobering effect I can only see as edifying

And it wasn't without charm, or mischief

Here is Mark Fisher on Sebald.

As a counterpoint, here is Mark Fisher making the identical complaint about Sebald in Suffolk. https://t.co/zxeXEgI5Lj pic.twitter.com/Absntwwh3P

— Ryan Ruby (@_ryanruby_) November 17, 2021

(Think I've seen it mentioned MF didn't like him but hadn't seen a passage.)

So, wait, is the complaint that Sebald emphasizes towns and vistas in decline?

lmao i do not care what mark fisher thinks about sebald. capitalism, sure

thought*

The complaint is that he is not paying attention to what he's looking at xxp

i frankly don't understand that complaint at all

He doesn't dwell on Suffolk for very long at a time, but it really is above all a framing device

it's a tapestry, one observation ends up being part of a warp and weft of memory and history, which... idk, i don't know who reads these books expecting them to be actual travelogue, sounds like some imposed shit

also fake accounts is such an awful book that i think oyler has no business parodying sebald, admittedly i am in my feelings here

I don't understand either. It's hilarious how Fisher compares Sebald's walking tours with James' when James noticed a lot of decline too.

Perhaps the transitions between the Suffolk-walk frame and the discursions on hubris and impermanence are the weaker parts of his conceit, and they do at times distract (the bit about the sandstorm near the end was fairly ludicrous and frankly unbelievable) but hey, it got him writing

It also amuses me that it came out at around the same time as Bill Bryson's Notes From A Small Island

I am uninterested in Oyler's fiction though I like some of her essays. Admittedly, this is one of her weaker ones.

It’s often said that Sebald’s work haunts, and is haunted. Do I like this? Not really, no. At times the gloom approaches parody—towns tend to be eerily abandoned, landscapes are shrouded in fog; even a passing car can’t escape without becoming “the last of an amphibian species close to extinction, retreating now to the deeper waters.” In projecting a ridiculous gravitas onto modern life, he might effectively emphasize its absence, but he often literalizes the metaphor in a way that diminishes its poignancy; reading Sebald, one can forget that death entails loss as well as the memory of what is gone. I wonder if I could somehow blame him for the number of people who seem to actually believe in ghosts.

god what the fuck is this

her essays are structured like fucking tweet threads

Yeah that's completely wrong. TROS is full of the idea of things being lost forever

And while he may sometimes slightly overplay his gloomy hand, as with the sandstorm, that his visions lead directly to (at times artfully embellished) lessons from history mean they don't overwhelm. It's not like you're wading through similes for 200 pages (hello, Housekeeping)

reading Sebald, one can forget that death entails loss as well as the memory of what is gone. I wonder if I could somehow blame him for the number of people who seem to actually believe in ghosts.

I guess I read the story of Henry Selwyn wrong.

"even a passing car can’t escape without becoming “the last of an amphibian species close to extinction, retreating now to the deeper waters.”"

Ok..

See, I don't find Sebald gloomy. The tone reminds me of Isherwood's of all people: he places himself in situations where he can watch people and things or recount events with poignantly ironic engagement.

Oyler is complaining about the gloom approaching parody.

i mean, i did visit berlin a few years ago and read vertigo the entire time so i am not beyond self-parody here

He's consciously working in a gothic tradition, right? It seems like that involves keeping gravitas and parody in tension.

i did find tros to be a little too sadboi for me. since i'm already a sadboi, i like my sadboi to be a bit less generalized and amorphous? less radiohead, more robert wyatt. the sadboi in austerlitz is attached to a more concrete idea of cultural trauma so i find it more convincing. i'm losing some of my memory of tros though, it's been a year.

for sure Austerlitz is his most fully realized book. I was afraid I'd think of it otherwise when I read it during lockdown in 2020 but -- nope.

i've been meaning to read the emigrants or vertigo next but i'm not sure which one to go with first.

emigrants!!! vertigo feels def like the first book he wrote in this style but emigrants refines it in every way

thanks for the tip

I'd go Emigrants -> Austerlitz -> ROS in that order

The Rings of Saturn is such a singular book, that essay was pretty badly written and misses the point completely. It is very funny to start it with an Americanized bad parody though, what an idiot. I remember being like 19 or 20 and having to finish a college essay very quickly and doing the same thing (writing the essay in the voice of Rings of Saturn probably mixed with Gaddis' Agape Agape). Years ago a friend and I were at a bar talking about how it's probably impossible for Americans to write in certain styles, like, in an American version of Austerlitz where would the characters meet, in Albertsons?

at a hilton in austin - work conference

spend every sentence inserting "like" and "y'know" and "the Dolphins suck"

i'm trying to read rings of saturn and i really don't get it. the writing and observations don't seem interesting enough to carry the peripatetic structure. i find it very dull and impossible to focus on (it should be noted that i get dumber with each passing year). what am i missing?

Maybe try Austerlitz.

austerlitz is better and much more memorable imo

thirding Austerlitz. I had the same trouble you did, n/a.

Austerlitz is a better book imo

you gotta kinda be losing your mind or going through a divorce to get in the rings of saturn zone, then it's pretty funny

I was about to type this out again lol

Years ago a friend and I were at a bar talking about how it's probably impossible for Americans to write in certain styles, like, in an American version of Austerlitz where would the characters meet, in Albertsons?

― Bongo Jongus, Wednesday, November 17, 2021 7:48 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol at rings of saturn behing a divorced guy book

It took me so long to read and finish Rings Of Saturn. It wasn't until towards the end that I realised why it was so slow going. I hadn't noticed how idiosyncratic and exhausting a lot of the sentences were for a start. And yeah, often the subject matter veers strongly into "Why should I care? Why is this important?" or simply "Where are you going with this?" And yet somehow I'm glad I did read it. I don't think I'll forget it in a hurry.

Austerlitz definitely the better book but Rings of Saturn is still extraordinary. Twinned with Last Year at Marienbad in my head.

I like the whole cult that's grown up around Rings of Saturn 'walks' and, despite the intimate knowledge he had of the landscape, the number of odd elisions and outright geographical falsifications Sebald included in the book.

there’s a whole fucking biography of joseph conrad in the middle of this thing

hell yeah there is

otm

that's the grandest part

the passages about the now-lost North Sea fisheries are peculiarly affecting

i made myself finish rings of saturn. there were some chunks in the middle that i got into just as interesting as historical anecdotes. but i found the book as a whole very tedious and i'm still in the woods re: the point

the segment i liked was joseph conrad/roger casement/the chinese dowager princess/the old english manor that is crumbling with the old family still living in it. but i still feel like i would have gotten just as much out of reading the wikipedia page on casement e.g.

Also I had to order a Borges anthology and break to read some of that halfway through

I have read it convincingly argued that the concluding section of TROS is all holocaust-related, but I can't find the article

Almost all of it seems to be atrocity-related at least