'Die Ausgewanderten' ('The Emigrants') by W.G. Sebald (Review)

Of the plans I made for German Literature Month, today's book was the one most set in concrete.  Having read (and loved) two books by W.G. Sebald already, I was eager to try another of his (unfortunately small) back catalogue, this time a book of four connected stories.  The setting is a little different, but there's no mistaking the style - he was a writer who definitely had a way with words...

*****
Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) was one of Sebald's earlier works of fiction, a book where a familiar narrator tells us stories of people forced to leave their homelands at some point during the twentieth century.  The four sections each focus on a different person, all of them someone from the narrator's life.  There's a man the narrator rented a house from in East Anglia; his former primary school teacher; a great-uncle who emigrated to the US; and an artist he met during his time as a research student in Manchester.  Over 350 pages, we learn that these men are linked by their experiences - and are representative of the fates of millions of people throughout Europe in the twentieth century...

Die Ausgewanderten is another Sebaldian trip through time, four excellent stories accompanied by the usual black-and-white photos.  For the first-time reader, one of the main puzzles is working out whether the book is fact or fiction.  These are stories, but you could be forgiven for thinking it's all out of the Sebald family archives - which is not to say that it's completely made up.  The ideas are obviously close to the writer's heart.

The main theme of the book is the effect of war on Europe and, in particular, its Jewish population.  Each of the four protagonists is affected in some way, with most being forced to leave their home, and their fate is representative of the wider suffering of their people, a suffering (as shown with the narrator's Great-Uncle Ambros) which leaves its mark:

"Nichtsdestoweniger erweckte er, selbst wenn er nur am Fenster stand und hinausblickte, stets den Eindruck, als sei er von einem heillosen Leid erfüllt."
p.162 (Fischer Verlag, 2013)

"Nevertheless, he constantly aroused, even when merely standing at the window and gazing out, the impression that he was suffused with incurable suffering." *** (my translation)

These examples of the Jewish diaspora show the reader that the pain caused by displacement never really goes away. 

The suffering takes its toll, and the four men are gradually worn down by a life that shouldn't have been theirs.  As each story nears its end we learn of the inevitable consequences of their hurt, whether it be self-harm, deliberate isolation or suicide, with each of the men turning away from the world.  On the whole they prefer nature to the company of other people, hiding as far away as possible, in hunting lodges, abandoned buildings or the mountains.

The narrator is a curious researcher, drawn to find out more about the figures from the past, each fact leading him on, drawing him further into the story.  This communicates itself to the reader in the way the stories lead on to other stories, giving us third- or even fourth-hand information (and the rather blurred lines between fact and fiction).  Whether we ever really get to the heart of the matter is another question entirely...

While the Jewish question is the obvious starting point of the book, another major theme

is homosexuality, overt in at least one story, latent in all the others.  All of the main characters are men who seem uncomfortable in the presence of women (even the man who's married to one), and there's a hint of a suggestion that a rejection of a so-called 'normal' sexual orientation is another way of turning against the world.  This is a topic which has been handled at length by the academic and writer Helen Finch, in her book Sebald's Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, and while I've only read summaries of her work, having finished Die Ausgewanderten, I can definitely see where she's coming from.

While there are four stories, they're of differing lengths with the final two being much longer than the first sections.  I enjoyed them all, but I found the third part, about the great-uncle, to be the weakest of the four; it was far too long for what it was and was overburdened by too many diary extracts.  However, once Sebald gets back to the narrator's voice, the language, as always, is stunning.  It's the usual tale of meticulously constructed sentences with a sprinkling of slightly formal, old-fashioned language (e.g. obzwar, demungeachtet, wenn ich ihrer ansichtig wurde).  This old-fashioned tone works well here, adding to the effect of a man unearthing history. 

A tale of four men, then?  Well, no - I'd say five.  You see, the fifth of the 'emigrants' is the narrator himself (i.e. Sebald...), and this becomes obvious when he makes a trip to Germany towards the end of the book in an attempt to find his lost home.  It's an endeavour that was never likely to succeed:

"Obgleich ich während meines mehrtägigen Aufenthalts in Kissingen und in dem von seinem einstmaligen Charakter nicht das geringste mehr verratenden Steinach zur Genüge beschäftigt gewesen bin mit meinen Nachforschungen und meiner wie immer nur mühevoll vorangehenden Schreibarbeit, spürte ich doch in zunehmendem Maß, daß die rings mich umgebende Geistesverarmung und Erinnerungslosigkeit der Deutschen, das Geschick, mit dem man alles bereinigt hatte, mir Kopf und Nerven anzugreifen begann." (pp.332/3)

"Although, during my stay of several days in Kissingen and in Steinach, which revealed not the slightest hint of its former character, I was satisfactorily engaged with my research and my writing, which, as always, was progressing only with great difficulty, I increasingly felt that the surrounding intellectual poverty and inability to remember of the German people, the skill with which everything had been whitewashed, was beginning to play on my nerves." ***

Sometimes, it's just not possible to go home...

*****
An English version (The Emigrants) is available from Vintage Books in Michael Hulse's translation (and having laboured for an age to produce the tiny (inadequate) quotation just above, I take my hat off to him...).

'Austerlitz' by W.G. Sebald (Review)

Time for more from German Literature Month, and today we're looking at a male author, one a few of you may have heard of.  I loved my first book by W.G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn), so I've been meaning to get to today's offering for a long time - and what better time than November?  Time to hop on board the bus for another Sebaldian journey of discovery :)

*****
Austerlitz*** sees an unnamed narrator, on a pointless trip to the Belgian city of Antwerp, make a chance acquaintance in an ostentatious railway station waiting room.  The person he meets, Jacques Austerlitz, is a man obsessed with buildings and form, travelling all over western Europe to inspect and photograph the architecture, and a rapport soon arises between the two men.

Despite this, they make no real plans to meet in the future, and their subsequent meetings are, once again, bizarrely random.  Even more unusual is the way that Austerlitz treats each meeting as a continuation of the last conversation, starting off their chats where they had broken off last time.  Of course, 'chats' is probably a misnomer - in reality, the book consists of Austerlitz telling his new acquaintance his story.  It's worth it though, a tale of a boy, two names and a continent at war...

Austerlitz is a holocaust story with a difference; in fact, we're not even sure it is one until half-way through.  The title character is a boy whose identity is a mystery - having grown up as Dafydd Elias in the Welsh countryside, it comes as quite a shock for him to find out that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz.  Part of the delay in finding out the man's identity lies squarely on his own shoulders though, as he deliberately looks the other way for most of his life, afraid of what he might find.  By the time he belatedly decides to search for information about his background, we sense that it might be too late (although we're also not entirely sure that it matters that much...).

Everything in the novel, despite the languid manner, is carefully planned.  Nothing is left to chance, and every detail reappears in its right place later in the story.  Near the start, the narrator offers the reader descriptions of Antwerp's old defensive walls and estates for workers to reside in.  Little do we know at the time that these off-the-cuff remarks actually foreshadow more ominous versions of the buildings later in the text.  Buildings, stars, pictures, tents in the desert - in Sebald's work, everything has its place...

The story, and the events described within it, go back and forth, are unpredictable.  Buildings in London echo train stations on the continent, lakes in different countries evoke echoes of each other (even when one of them is hiding a chilling secret).  Every detail contributes to a greater idea, another piece in the puzzle, at times a matter of life and death:

"An der wand über der niedrigen Werkbank Evans, sagte Austerlitz, hing von einem Haken der schwarze Schleier, den der Großvater von der Bahre abgenommen hatte, als die kleinen vermummten Gestalten sie vorübertrugen an ihm, und gewiß ist es Evans gewesen, sagte Austerlitz, der mir einmal sagte, mehr als ein solches Seidentuch trenne uns nicht von der nächsten Welt."
pp.83/4 (Fischer Verlag, 2011)

"On the wall above Evans' low work bench, said Austerlitz, there hung from a hook the black veil which Evans' Grandfather had taken from the funeral bier as the small, masked figures carried it past him, and it must also have been Evans, said Austerlitz, who told me once that nothing more than such a piece of silk separates us from the next life." (my translation)

Life and death, apparently, are closer together than we like to think.

This is, according to Sebald (according to Austerlitz) because time is like a river.  It flows, just like the text, but not in a straight, usual, temporal manner.  The writer provides us with frequent reminders that the past and future are always there, ready to be unlocked when someone finds the right key:

"Es scheint mir nicht, sagte Austerlitz, daß wir die Gesetze verstehen, unter denen sich die Widerkunft der Vergangenheit vollzieht, doch ist es mir immer mehr, als gäbe es überhaupt keine Zeit, sondern nur verschiedene, nach einer höheren Stereometrie ineinander verschachtelte Räume, zwischen denen die Lebendigen und die Toten, je nachdem es ihnen zumute ist, hin und her gehen können, und je länger ich es bedenke, desto mehr kommt mir vor, daß wir, die wir uns noch am Leben befinden, in den Augen der Toten irreale und nur manchmal, unter bestimmten Lichtverhältnissen und atmosphärischen Bedingungen sichtbar werdende Wesen sind." (p.269)

"It seems to me, said Austerlitz, that we don't understand the laws, through which the eternal repetition of the past occurs, but I feel more and more as if there is no time, rather just various rooms, nestled inside each other according to a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead, as they desire, can go back and forth, and the longer I consider it, the more I realise that we, who are still to be found in the land of the living, become, in the eyes of the dead, unreal and, only occasionally, under certain circumstances of light and atmospheric conditions, visible beings."

Austerlitz, unsurprisingly, is a man with no time for watches...

While Sebald plays up the idea of the closeness of the living and the dead, he prefers the reader and the action to be as far apart as possible.  As seen above, the narrator frequently reminds us that Austerlitz is speaking, taking us further away from the action being related.  In fact, at several points, we get third-, or even fourth-hand knowledge, where (for example) the narrator tells us what Austerlitz tells him of a story related by a character named Věra, who in turn is recounting the words of a man called Maximillian...

Another aspect of his style, as you may have noticed above, is his predilection for what I like to call 'Russian Doll' sentences, a mesmerising creation of clause within clause, with detail upon detail piling up until you can barely recall where, or why, the idea started.  I spent a long time translating the few lines above - trust me, I know what I'm talking about!  On top of this, the book consists of a few gigantic paragraphs, an immense wall of words, a decision which makes knowing when to stop reading a rather difficult task.  Where do you stop for the night, when the novel never really stops?

I say 'novel', but Sebald does his best to convince us at times that Austerlitz is anything but.  The book already appears more like a work of non-fiction than a story, and the frequent use of photographs to accompany the people and places described can put a momentary doubt in your mind.  In the first part of the book, especially, we seem so far away from any kind of plot, or even forward momentum, that the average reader will begin to doubt that they exist.  Slowly, inexorably, though, the scales fall from our eyes, and we begin to discern the slow, steady approach of the Nazi horrors.  And why should we rush towards that...

Austerlitz is another superb book that defies description and categorisation, as much as I've tried to do both here today.  It's a work which shows us that the line between fiction and non-fiction is a rather blurred one, and that the past and present aren't quite as distinct as we might think either.  This is a book I recommend you try, and if you do, I'm sure that you, like me, will want to read more of his work.  Add me to the list of Sebald completists ;)

*****
*** An English-language version of Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell, is available from Random House

Ever-Decreasing Circles

One of the great pleasures in life is finally setting aside time for a writer you've been wanting to try for ages, and W.G. Sebald is someone who definitely falls into that category.  After hearing several bloggers I admire talk about his work recently, I belatedly got down to reading Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn), and a wonderful read it was too.  Still, on finishing the book, I did find myself scratching my head a little: is this book a work of genius, or the height of self-indulgence?  Let's leave that there for a while...

*****
Die Ringe des Saturn is a travelogue of sorts, a collection of anecdotes centred upon Sebald's walking tour through the English coastal county of Suffolk.  The writer makes the decision to go on his trek after recovering in hospital from a fairly serious bout of illness, and this causes the book to have a profound sense of both intro- and retrospection, colouring his thoughts and the descriptions of the countryside with which he provides the reader.

This, however, is far from being a straight account of what Mr. Sebald did on his holiday.  Unable to stick to a simple, descriptive retelling of his tour, Sebald goes off at tangents at every opportunity.  A glance out over the cliffs to the choppy North Sea soon segues seamlessly into stories of seventeenth-century naval battles or colonial wars in South Africa.  At times, it's a little like Christmas dinner with a senile old uncle, with a story from the past just around every corner...

Of course, this is all very deliberate.  While Die Ringe des Saturn may, at first glance, appear to be akin to something written by Bill Bryson (albeit more stylishly and with less toilet humour), there are patterns to be found in the apparent madness of the structure.  A recurring theme is the cruel nature of time, eating away inevitably, unstoppably, at institutions once thought eternal.  His visits to stately homes, once regal, now moth-eaten and drab, reflect his gloomy view of his own mortality.  Even the land itself is proven to be less than permanent - in one chapter, he gazes out over the remains of a once-thriving coastal town, a church precariously balanced on a cliff the only reminder of a settlement which has been swallowed by the unforgiving sea.

Sebald also uses Die Ringe des Saturn to examine post-colonialism, with most of the chapters either looking back at Imperial times or examining how the end of the Empire has affected the places he visits.  Seen through this lens, the apparently random collection of academic anecdotes he comes up with (including tales of house burning in Ireland, slave-driving in the Congo, intervention in Chinese civil wars, a trip to the battlefields of Waterloo) actually make perfect sense.  There's a structure to the book, a carefully-planned design which holds it all together to form an impressive finished product.  Now, if only I could work out exactly what that is...

Reading Die Ringe des Saturn was great fun as it's the kind of book you can savour slowly, stopping after each of Sebald's musings to ponder on the significance of the vignette you've just finished.  The language is slightly unusual in German (Sebald's Wikipedia page claims that his German is occasionally a little old-fashioned), and it can take a little deciphering.  He frequently uses the very German Russian-doll construction of using a series of relative clauses one within the other, leaving the reader hanging until the end of a very long sentence to discover how the first clause actually ends.  It certainly makes you concentrate very carefully on the text :)

Another fairly unique element to Sebald's writing is his use of photographs to support the text.  The book is full of his snapshots, or reproductions of paintings or public documents, and the effect is to give the text a more non-fiction feel, making it into more of an academic work.  However, underneath this dry top layer of the text, there is a sense of a narrative, an underlying fiction which works against the apparent historical, factual writing above.  I am very aware that this makes extremely little sense outside my head...

Die Ringe des Saturn is a wonderful read - the fact that I ordered a copy of Austerlitz immediately after finishing it shows that I was very impressed -, but I was still not entirely sure what to make of it.  Was it a wonderfully-plotted work, or did Sebald simply ramble on about things I didn't really need to know?  Luckily, the answer eventually popped into my head in the form of a polite query (the sort of thing a certain Amateur Reader might say...): why can't the book be both a work of genius and the height of self-indulgence?  They're certainly not mutually exclusive...

And I think that's where I'll leave it for today - if anyone has any other ideas, you know where to find me ;)