The Sebald Fiction Poll

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