Two books
I don't read biographies very often. I have a hard time remembering names. When at their beginnings, there is talk about the family, possibly going back to grandparents, I struggle with keeping this person apart from that person -- and what do I care about other people's childhood friends or some grandfather's business associates anyway?
But I had read a very complimentary review of Carole Angier's biography of WG Sebald, and it seemed like a book that I would get a lot out of.
I didn't.
In fact, the biography is so bad that I didn't bother finishing it. I read about one fifth and stopped.
Before a couple of authors voiced their criticism a lot better than I would be able to (I'll get to that), here are my main problems with the book. First, it reads as if an accountant had written it. I understand that a person's life details inform their work. But I don't think I need to know about each and every detail, in particular since unlike Angier would want us to believe, not every detail actually matters -- and certainly not in equal fashion. For example, I don't need to know the nicknames of someone's elementary school teacher (and if you give me a German language nickname but can't find out what it means, maybe don't mention it?).
A larger problem for me was that Angier doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the word "fiction". Fiction is fiction, meaning that it has a connection to lived life while at the same time being, well, fictional. It's ultimately not real, but it could be. That's what's interesting about it.
One of the most common mistakes is to confuse a writer with their work. As it turned out, Sebald did use a number of real-life events and people as material from which he produced his works. That is, well, moderately interesting. But I don't think that it provides all that much insight. In the book, Angier spends pages and pages and pages presenting all the details: talking to people who found aspects of their lives in some of Sebald's work.
But fiction is still fiction. And to then present the misgivings of those people -- as if Sebald had in fact written a documentary -- does not provide all that much insight.
It is as if Angier was unable to see the larger point of Sebald's work. This, then, is the main point raised by Ben Lerner who wrote about the biography. Sebald's borrowing and supposed fibs are mostly a lot less interesting than what he was trying to get at.
Judith Shulevitz's response is similar:
"Did Sebald commit acts of what we now call cultural appropriation? Yes, but to condemn him for that would be to miss the layers of meaning that complicate moral judgment."
And:
"[Sebald's] accounts of Jewish amnesia, without betraying the unique Jewish ordeal, share a root system, as it were, with German amnesia. The condition of not-knowing-yet-knowing that he attributes to some Jewish characters is sufficiently evocative of the national fugue state blanketing his childhood that we should not ignore the parallel, whether Sebald was conscious of it or not."
And:
"Literature is parasitical, sometimes in disturbing ways, and that is a source of its power."
That's the real kicker. That's hard to live with, isn't it? But I think it's so true.
Having put aside the Sebald biography -- to the degree that you put something aside that only exists as data on some little plastic computer screen, I looked at my Reading List and decided I needed to go back to Japanese literature.
That's a great app btw: Reading List. If, like me, you come across too many books you want to read and if, like me, you stress yourself out over trying to remember them, the app will come in handy. My friend and colleague Joanna Cresswell told me about it (we have been sharing book recommendations for a while).
I wasn't prepared for Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station. I'm glad I wasn't. Had I known what I would get into I probably would have waited a little bit for a better moment, even though that better moment would have largely being illusory. It's an absolutely incredible book whose visceral powers shook me deeply.
It's a relatively short book, but it felt as if there had been so much in it. Its construction is absolutely bonkers: it's non-linear, it mixes locations and points in time by switching between memories and seemingly random observations effortlessly, and there are some ideas of magical realism thrown in, except they're the Japanese kind where the souls of the departed come to haunt the land when the circumstances of their departure wasn't proper.
You should read it, it's incredible.
And now I'm back reading Ludwig Wittgenstein (if you've read Sebald, you'll remember a picture of his eyes from one of the novels). But this time, it's a form of research. I studied a little bit of philosophy as an undergraduate student, and I had read a lot of his writing back in the day.
Having finished work on the book I had been working on (I'm now trying to find a publisher), I decided that I want to write a book that is not about photography at all. I had entertained the idea for a long time. But I didn't think I would be able to do it until a few weeks ago.
I'm really excited about the fact that I now feel that I can do it. I think that excitement might be hard to understand, and I don't want to continue yapping on about it. Now, whenever I can find some time, I'm working on the beginnings of what I hope to be my next book.
With that I'm going to conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg