Couldn't Have Said it Better

[Richard Romeo]

>

>Wednesday, December 18, 2001 (SF Gate)
>W.G. Sebald: In Memoriam/On the sudden, tragic death of a quietly radiant 
>author you've probably never heard of
>By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist>
>
>    Of course it is entirely and grimly appropriate that W.G. Sebald, the 
> >quietly brilliant, altogether beautiful German professor and author of a 
> >handful of unforgettable, elegiac books only recently beginning to make 
> >any sort of cultural impress in the US, should have died this week, 
> >tragically, unexpectedly, in a car accident near his home in England, at 
> >the age of 57.
>
>    Appropriate in how it's quite possibly the ultimate in mournful grace 
> >notes to a painful and brutish year, one full of corruption and nasty 
> >politics, of bombs and bin Ladens and the death of the quiet Beatle, a 
> >gutted economy and a distressed populace and a perpetually 
>baffled-looking >president no one really feels has much idea about what's 
>truly going on.
>
>    Not enough pathos and injustice in this heartbroken bundt cake of 
>disaster >and anguish, said the Gods of Fate and Time, apparently, looking 
>back on >2001. One more lacerating whorl, one more blast of sulfur, one 
>final >pinprick to the soul of humanity and the year will be complete, the 
>dark >cycle hitting its lowest turn, the final insult to the benign 
>intelligence >of the world. This is what it feels like.
>
>    I have read but one book and one book only by W.G. Sebald, so far. It 
>is >called "The Rings of Saturn." This is all it took.
>
>    One deeply literary, profoundly moving dance with this man's wisdom and 
> >gentleness and he was instantly catapulted to the upper echelons of 
> >All-Time Favorites, that rarified and sparkling land populated by a very 
> >select group of books and writers and food groups most of which contain 
> >chocolate or perhaps wine, the ones you guard as precious and sacred for 
> >what they're brought you as a reader, as a developing being, as a living 
> >soul struggling to navigate the rapids of love and death and time in your 
> >leaky little rowboat.
>
>    He is this kind of writer. Spare but languid, shockingly unpretentious, 
> >dream-like, awash in thick swaths of memory and desire, moving though 
> >scenes and tangents and vignettes like a jazz guitarist moves through 
> >moods and musical keys and lost loves, effortless and subtle and entirely 
> >captivating.
>
>    Sebald was not widely known. He was not a celebrity author, traipsing 
> >around the country on Barnes & Noble book tours, signing copies and 
> >sipping tea and answering questions. There is a very good chance you have 
> >never heard of him. There is a very good chance most of the world will 
> >never discover his work. This would be an additional tragedy.
>
>    Critic James Wood, writing in the New Republic, desribed him this way: 
> >"Anxious, daring, extreme, muted ‹ only an annulling wash of 
>contradictory >adjectives can approach the agitated density of W. G. 
>Sebald's writing." >In other words, this is not ordinary writing. It is 
>extraordinary writing.
>
>    "The Rings of Saturn" is not fiction. It is not quite non-fiction. It 
>is >history and time and texture and light; it is a journey and a 
>pilgrimage >and a meditation, told in fragments and shards and shadows, one 
>man on a >solo walking tour of the nearly barren eastern coast of England, 
>observing >and remembering and pondering in such a way that you are at once 
>riveted >and moved and stunned. It defies classification.
>
>    It would be easy to rage about this, about the incredible unfairness of 
>it >all, about why him and not one of the hate-spewing war-mongers out 
>there, >why someone who brings only elegance and perspective and art 
>instead of >someone who brings death and rage and zealotry. This sentiment 
>must be >avoided. This way only bitterness and further sadness lies.
>
>    I knew precious little of Mr. Sebald's personal history as a man or an 
> >author beyond what I had read on the book jacket and now in his NYT 
> >obituary. I know of his new book, "Austerlitz," an excerpt of which I 
>read >recently in the New Yorker. I know of his other two books available 
>in >translation, "The Emigrants" and "Vertigo," both slightly older works 
>and >both dealing, in his gentle and enigmatic, perfect-pitch manner, with 
>WWII >and the Holocaust.
>
>    Sebald was a professor of European Literature at the University of East 
> >Anglia in Norwich. He was a poet and a novelist and an essayist, a critic 
> >of German lit, a teacher of German studies. He was trim and professorial 
> >and darkly humorous. Does this help you know? Maybe a little.
>
>    This is probably the way it should be with writers. You are not
>necessarily meant to know them, do not necessarily need to understand
>their lives or learn of their personal predilections in order to be
>profoundly and perhaps permanently transformed by the fragrant
>kaleidoscopic fires they ignite in your mind and heart like a match to
>sighing tinder.
>
>    All you need is the words. All you need is the experience of sitting 
>down >with them, allowing them to guide you, show you the rugged landscape 
>of >the world and the soul in a new and perhaps enlightening, perhaps 
> >inspiring, perhaps heartbreaking light. And with Sebald, this is now all 
> >we have left. A finite set of words and images, an all-too-limited range 
> >of insights and gentle probings into the human animal unlike any you have 
> >ever read.
>
>    Let us hope the sorrow is complete. Let us hope this final, small,
>incredibly cruel tragedy marks the turning point, the juncture at which we 
> >can at last begin to recover, reevaluate, grow and feel and laugh and 
> >breathe.
>
>    And read. Sit down and read deeply and remember and become transformed, 
> >even just a little, because it's necessary and good and absolutely 
> >critical, now more than ever. Maybe we can do just that.
>

>    Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday 
>on
>SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does.
>He also writes the Morning Fix, a wry and deeply skewed daily email column
>and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Copyright 2001 SF Gate


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