Reading the 20th Century discussion

That's a question I'm going to hand over to RC


I tend to skate over the surface and not dwell upon points of style



I dont think it's a book that can really be spoiled but best to be cautious

Roman Clodia wrote: "Going back to the issue of 'wrongful trespass', I've seen a few reviews that mention Sebald was not Jewish and was a German who was born in 1944 so didn't experience the war personally. I have the ..."

I'm not sure it's quite accurate to say that someone born in Germany in 1944 didn't experience the war personally, because the war was pretty all consuming. I do agree, though, that things that happen to us in infancy are different kinds of experiences than things that happen after we are old enough to remember them, and that there's an even greater difference with things that happen when we are old enough to choose what to do.

While all four profiles are of figures who would likely have been destroyed in the Holocaust, if we define Holocaust as all the victims of the Nazi project, and not merely Jewish persons, I sense that the thing WGS is wrestling with here is more than that aspect of the Nazi regime.

Ben wrote: "You are all far ahead of me in the book so I’m reading the comments lightly until I get further.

I find the style absorbing although it takes some thought to burrow through the syntax and digest ..."

I supposed that this is a way of indicating how hard it is to capture truth through time and memory. I don't know if that's right--it's a pretty superficial take, I realize, but that's where I went. I've not quite finished--I have about 35 pages to go.

G wrote: "I sense that the thing WGS is wrestling with here is more than that aspect of the Nazi regime."

Yes, I would agree with that - I think he's concerned with ideas of corruption and destruction more widely as is made clearer in the stories that are in the foreground of Rings of Saturn, for example.

And while he's struggling with what happened under the Nazis, he's not limited to that regime - there's a sort of despair at what humanity is capable of. I think this is important as an aspect to postmodernism which puts a full stop on the post-Enlightenment narrative of human progress.

At the same time, there is a personal sense of almost-guilt and burden which Sebald has talked about in being German and somehow implicated in something even though he wasn't born until 1944. It may not be rational but it was how he felt and so we have to respect that.

Roman Clodia wrote: "...At the same time, there is a personal sense of almost-guilt and burden which Sebald has talked about in being German and somehow implicated in something even though he wasn't born until 1944. It may not be rational but it was how he felt and so we have to respect that.."

It is how many, if not most, West Germans have felt, at least into the 80's. Those born after the war of course experienced that sense of corporate guilt differently than those born before or during the war. And I can say that almost every non-German I've ever talked to who was alive before or during the war (and not a few who were born well into the 50's) that I've talked to shares that assessment.
I'm less informed on how East Germans felt. Given that the Soviets used their extended occupation to punish East Germans relentlessly, I think the feelings for that population are rather more complex.

Ben wrote: "... the frequent use of contradictory terms within a single statement"

I do agree with G's 'I supposed that this is a way of indicating how hard it is to capture truth through time and memory' but I think it also goes beyond that to involve the reader in questioning what is the 'truth', how reliable any one truth is, and how contingent it may be.

It feels in line with Sebald's use of jarring details that push us out of the narrative, a kind of deliberate alienation effect (as happened to G with the use of BEA that didn't exist at the time someone was supposed to be flying on the carrier).

Similarly, there are those questions posed over the photos that are included - I raised these questions in post #25 but am copying here the deliberate problematising of the photos in the first section that Dr Selwyn shows the narrator and his wife: 'one of the shots resembled, even in detail, a photograph of Nabokov in the mountains above Gstaad that I had clipped from a Swiss magazine a few days before. Strangely enough, both Edwin and Dr Selwyn made a distinctly youthful impression on the pictures they showed us, though at the time they made the trip, exactly ten years earlier, they were already in their late sixties'. And a bit later, 'neither Edwin nor Dr Selwyn was willing or able to make any remark concerning these pictures.'

We later realise that Nabokov turns up in each of the four sections, a writer who plays with ideas of artifice and reality with spectacular effect.

I'm so glad we read this. I've just posted my review.

Funny how the complexity of Sebald's style feels so readable to me.

It's interesting to compare Sebald's interest and method in capturing memory with Proust's. Of course, I'm just a third of the way through Proust's project and am reluctant to pronounce on the differences before completing Proust -- which I WILL do. Clearly Sebald is less concerned with the individual, personal experience of memory and more focused on making manifest a social memory, memorialising the destruction of individuals and communities through division, hatred and war. How much of the memories are true and how much are fictional are directly laid out on the page, with fictional figures mixed with the real, real photographs given different meanings. How does the reader distinguish the real from the invented, and when does it matter?

Great choice. Great read.

The Rings of Saturn will be my next Sebald, to be nominated in a future month.

Great review Ben, thanks....


https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


I'm so glad it worked for you

The Rings Of Saturn is the only other book I have read by Sebald and I loved it

I enjoyed reading your review, Ben. And I see we both quoted that para about the narrator's struggle with his inadequacies at telling these stories.

I found this less sophisticated than the other two Sebalds as the link to the Holocaust was direct. Rings of Saturn is my favourite but I wonder if that's because it was my first? The techniques and the intention are the same with all three of his books I've read. I understand that this is giving due weight to the moral catastrophe of the Holocaust and the personal burden to Sebald.

Roman Clodia wrote: "I enjoyed reading your review, Ben. And I see we both quoted that para about the narrator's struggle with his inadequacies at telling these stories.

I found this less sophisticated than the other ..."

Yes, I love those passages in which writers use a character in their novels to talk about writing, even though it's a character talking and not the writer's direct voice.

Ben wrote: "I love those passages in which writers use a character in their novels to talk about writing, even though it's a character talking and not the writer's direct voice."

And in this case, that's part of what Sebald is struggling with across all his books I've read: how to write something so huge and monstrous and incomprehensible, while, at the same time, feeling unable to not address it.

I do empathise with his quandary, and the integrity and humility he shows in trying to do literary justice to such a thing as the Holocaust. But I still feel that I'm reading the same book from him each time.

Roman Clodia wrote:


"I still feel that I'm reading the same book from him each time."

I've only read this and The Rings of Saturn, and whilst his preoccupations remain unchanged I felt it was a different reading experience. I was captivated by Sebald’s curious travelogue/history/memoir hybrid, and learned a lot....

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


I enjoyed it more than this one which gives you an idea of how good I thought it was

I gave Rings of Saturn 5-stars too and loved the eccentric stories and characters we met. But, as you say, the underlying preoccupation is with the Holocaust - it worked for me when that was his first and most sophisticated book but reading backwards from there the books have got simpler with the same techniques of enigmatic photos, hybridity etc.

But I accept that mine may be a controversial opinion! I completely agree that Sebald has important things to say and he says them beautifully but I think after three books he hasn't got anything new to say to me.

All good points RC


Perhaps The Rings of Saturn is all anyone really needs to read?

I'm glad I still have that one to read.

Roman Clodia wrote: "But I still feel that I'm reading the same book from him each time."

It sounds as though Sebald got better at it as he went along, judging from your ratings.

In comparison, Proust literally wrote the same book for his whole life. ; )

And I suppose if you look backwards from Ulysses to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Dubliners, all of the earlier two books are contained and extended in Ulysses. (Can't comment on Finnegan's Wake)

So it's an interesting question how you think of an artist's lifetime work, when there is a predominant subject, theme or style. Is it the same work, growth or something else. For me, the acid test is I was fully engaged.

Another thought is when you like a writer's style, the familiarity can be a positive as well as a negative, like what you gain from reading the same work multiple times.

JCO is of course a contrary case.

I like your questions, Ben!

For me, Rings of Saturn is the best Sebald but that may be because it was my first and I had to work hardest to get a sense of what he was doing. If read in published order, it would likely feel like the culmination of his art. I'll be interested in your thoughts when you get to it.

You're right, of course, about an author's signature style or subject matter. For whatever reason, I don't feel like Jane Austen or Barbara Pym, say, are re-writing the same book each time. Good point, though, about familiarity being a comforting, welcoming quality in some cases.

I'm really not intending to dismiss Sebald, I have huge respect for his work and how he thought about it - maybe this is a case where reading in published order would have shown artistic progression that didn't happen for me.

Just picking up on your thoughts on Joyce and Proust:

I think Joyce's style changes considerably according to what he's writing so the tone of Dubliners even in the different stories isn't the same as that of Portrait. Ulysses, of course, is a cacophony of voices!

Proust's writing style is the same across the volumes but the worlds are different in each episode: from the interiority of the various characters to the superficiality of society and the performativity of the salons. There is also movement across the work from first to last book.

I suspect that stasis is itself one of Sebald's intentions: just as characters in Emigrants never get past their experience, memory keeps them caught there and unable to move away (hence that horrific scene where the third man tries to have electric shock treatment to wipe out his own memories), so the narrative style itself keeps circling back on itself across all three books I've read.

I get it, I really do, it's clearly such an important part of Sebald's conception of his Germanness, this pull back to an inerasable and incomprehensible past.

Ben wrote: "How does the reader distinguish the real from the invented, and when does it matter?"

It doesn't matter to me in Sebald 's case because he's writing novels, not history, and because his concern is with emotional or artistic truth. I trust in his integrity.

But is that also because he's on the 'right' side of history? What if someone wrote novels to deny the Holocaust or other historical facts through the fictional use of real photos re-contextualised?

Just musing aloud here on the intersections between literature and history, between the objective and subjective.

I'm not suggesting that what Sebald is doing in his fiction is in any way invalid or dangerous. And I think you probably all know that I think literature has the ability to make 'history' emotionally real in a way that historical narrative doesn't necessarily for all of us. But there are interesting questions here, and I'd guess Sebald was acutely aware of them.

Great questions Ben, and fabulous answers RC

This is such a fundamental point, RC, and runs through the ages in Philosophy, Politics, the Arts and the Sciences.

Should Art, Rhetoric and Poetry be condemned because of the power to mislead (Plato, Religious Fundamentalists, etc.), or celebrated because of the power to inspire (everyone else)?

Are statements that are not factually verifiable mere nonsense or mere expressions of emotion (Early Wittgenstein and Logical Positivists) or do they represent the only true meaning of being human (Late Wittgenstein, Anthropologists and Social Scientists and everyone in the Humanties)?

Can history ever be scientific and objective? What is historical truth? Is history ever a telling of the past, or is it always a retelling of the present?

I for one cannot live without poetry, myth, song and emotion, but I also cannot live without critically trying to decide what is truth. Which is one thing that makes human endeavour so absorbing.

I just finished this today and realized that I am not at all willing to interrupt this wonderful discussion. This was my first Sebald so I am not in a position to comment on the idea of his writing the same novel. I tend to think that judgement must be measured in degrees and reflect the taste of the person making the judgement. As an example I would use Murakami. I think many of of consider he has been writing the same novel, and a lot of us laugh at the the bingo squares listing specific similarities in his work, but I don't think we would all agree to judge him too harshly for it despite our distaste for his focus on adolescent girl's breasts, Beatles' songs, and cats. I am looking forward to my next Sebald and if it is exactly like this one, I won't mind because when I finished this I was craving more. I think my comment puts me more in Ben's camp than RC's but RC's comments are so valuable since they provoke thought and debate that I hope one does not think I am taking a side here.

Sam wrote: "I hope one does not think I am taking a side here."

Haha, not at all - I'd don't even think there are sides - we're just exchanging nuanced views.

I haven't read Murakami so can't comment but the re-use of motifs (urgh, adolescent girls; breasts could be why I've never read Murakami!) isn't quite the same thing, I'd guess, as what Sebald is doing.

But, at the same time, I have the utmost respect for Sebald and the importance of his project, and would never want to put anyone else off reading him, wherever they start.

Ben wrote: "Should Art, Rhetoric and Poetry be condemned because of the power to mislead (Plato, Religious Fundamentalists, etc.), or celebrated because of the power to inspire (everyone else)?"

You obviously know way more about philosophy than me, Ben, but I'd agree that this is a question that has troubled humanity throughout history.

Even Plato is ambivalent about his own opinion: he'd exile all the poets and musicians from his ideal republic because of the power of art, yet he uses literary tropes and devices throughout his own writings: the dialogue form taken from theatre, the use of myths such as Atlantis, the shadows on the cave, the divided beings and the search for one's 'other half', not to mention the standard forms of rhetoric to make his writing so powerful from the characterisation of Socrates to the way he structures his arguments.

So he actually undermines his own argument, as does Cicero!

Ben wrote: "Is history ever a telling of the past, or is it always a retelling of the present?"

I'd love a historian's view on this - G?

From my literary point of view, history is always a narrative and reception theory tells us that we always read narrative from the horizons of our own experience. So the facts or experience we seek to recuperate from the past are shaped by the questions we ask, and those questions come from our present.

For example, feminist scholars from about the 1970s-80s challenged top-down, 'great man' versions of history by asking about women, lower classes, racial and sexual minorities and alternatives etc. If we now have e.g. queer history that's because we've asked those questions and gone searching for sources that can open up history and historical experiences in new directions - the underlying facts of 'history' haven't changed but what we go looking for has been shaped by our present.

It's the same with post-colonial history and projects like the National Trust's Colonial Countryside - we're not changing the facts of slavery money and how it came back to England whether to 'great houses' or institutions like Tate and other galleries and cultural institutions, it's just that a current crop of historians are no longer happy for this to be underground history, as it were and have excavated it for a present audience.

From a lovely article in The New Yorker about the complex mixture of fact and fiction in Sebald's works.

As a writer, Sebald had invented an arcane aesthetic by cobbling together things imagined and things recalled; his essays and novels challenge the idea that facts hold a greater claim to truth than misremembered faces, overlooked details or overheard gossip. Aunt Egelhofer, who was real, was Sebald’s gateway to the world of the Wallersteins, who were also real. And yet their narrative hovers in a misty zone typical of Sebald, who was loyal to neither history nor fiction but rather to an unstable confluence of invention, memory, and imagination.

Photographs also play a key role in all of Sebald’s books, casting an aura of documentation and verisimilitude on the narrative, and yet they are also vague and unreliable. Blurry images and illegible handwritten notebooks emphasize the imminent extinction of objects, people, places, or buildings that are already, or perhaps always were, on their way out. Jews, for Sebald, personify the very essence of transience and extraterritoriality, residents of a might-have-been world that has known better days. Other lines are blurred in Sebald’s universe, too. As a narrator in “The Emigrants” writes, “I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and again, because looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them."

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

That’s brilliant and perceptive


Thanks Ben

And from another New Yorker article, more biographical but with some close reading of 3 of Sebald's novels.

And then there is the oddity of Sebald’s prose. If you don’t care for his writing, you can feel that he’s just a postmodern antiquarian, a super-literate academic who stitched together a pastiche of his many nineteenth- and twentieth-century influences, and infused the result with doomy melancholy and unease. The Anglo-German poet Michael Hofmann accused Sebald of “nailing literature on to a home-made fog—or perhaps a 19th-century ready-made fog.” There may be something in that complaint. Probably the most frequent sentence in all of Sebald is some variant of “Nowhere was there a living soul to be seen.” Wherever the Sebaldian narrator finds himself, the landscape is uncannily unpeopled. He may be walking down an Italian street, or arriving in Lowestoft, or describing Edward FitzGerald’s childhood home, or driving through Manchester in the early morning, or meeting Jacques Austerlitz on the promenade at Zeebrugge. Rarely is there a single “soul” to be seen—and the slightly antique locution of “soul” (Seele, in German) is almost invariably used.

And another selection from the article.

Sebald’s landscapes are often places like this, where the living have disappeared into death, or where they have fallen into the obscurity of death even while still alive. “The Emigrants,” which is probably his best book, is a set of stories about people who have fallen in this way, as if having been dispossessed by history. The book is closer to documentary than is any of his other creative work. Names and some details have been changed, yet the written lives of its characters follow very closely their actual biographical contours. Sebald told me that ninety per cent of the photographs in the book “are what you would describe as authentic, i.e., they really did come out of the photo albums of the people described in those texts and are a direct testimony of the fact that these people did exist in that particular shape and form.”

And finally,

Scandalously, where documentary witness and fidelity is sacred, Sebald introduces the note of the unreliable. Not, of course, because he disdained the documentary impulse but, rather, in order to register that he himself, who was not Jewish and had only an indirect connection to the Shoah, was merely a survivor of the survivors—and even then only in a figurative sense. And also perhaps to register that the novelist who writes, of all outrageous things, fiction about the Holocaust cannot have a comfortable and straightforward relation to the real. For there I was, standing in a German library, searching for clues, peering intently at a photograph of a boy whose name will likely be forever lost, and replicating the very gesture of decipherment that the fictional character Jacques Austerlitz describes in Sebald’s novel.

Sebald has some beautiful words in “Austerlitz” about how, just as we have appointments to keep in the future, it may be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, “in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished.” We must go there, he writes, into the past, in search of places and people who have some connection with us, “on the far side of time, so to speak.” That last phrase puts me in mind of a famous passage from “Middlemarch,” in which George Eliot says that if we were truly open to all the suffering in the world it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we would die “of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Most of us, she finishes, manage to live by wadding ourselves with stupidity. We survive only by ignoring the faint but terrible roar. In his great work, Sebald visited that far side of time which was also the other side of silence. He could not ignore it.

The whole article, by James Woods, is worth a read by Sebald fans.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Thanks again Ben


I hadn't consciously noticed the persistently depopulated world he inhabits (but now you mention it...) - I'll will be looking out for that in future

Excellent point about WGS's unreliability and how it may relate to his not being Jewish

Thanks again Ben. I appreciate these excerpts as I am not subscribed to the New Yorker

We must go there, he writes, into the past, in search of places and people who have some connection with us

Indeed

A very eloquent review and I particularly like that 'postmodern antiquarian'.

But this: 'a set of stories about people who have fallen in this way, as if having been dispossessed by history' - for me, it's not that they're dispossessed by history, it's that they're so possessed, so consumed by history that they can't struggle out from under its weight.

I'd say the same thing about the Sebaldian narrator: that's especially the case in Rings of Saturn where the stories he's telling on his Norfolk travelogue don't usually have any ostensible connection to the Holocaust... until we realise issues of industrialized train tracks, of hot ovens, of (Hitler's) revival of silk farming are all pointing to a completely different story from the one in front of his/our eyes, and which shimmers into psychic being from a completely different landscape. This isn't being 'dispossessed' by history; this is suffering from the haunting of history.

Yes, two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. The writer and the survivors are so haunted by history that they can't escape it; it drains any other meaning and potential from their lives. On the other hand, history has knocked them out of the future lives of humanity. They have been dispossessed of their share in the world. They don't marry, or if they do they have no children. Their careers are stunted, their families murdered.

I can't comment on Rings of Saturn.

Ooh, nice reading, Ben! So they're so consumed by past history that they're dispossessed of their future... which becomes history.

That fits with the third story, the one which really affected me, where he tries to have electric shock treatment to wipe out his memories. But that would wipe him clean of his identity and sense of self too - maybe that's a desperate attempt to create a future starting in that moment in the present?

Roman Clodia wrote: "Ben wrote: "Is history ever a telling of the past, or is it always a retelling of the present?"

I'd love a historian's view on this - G?

From my literary point of view, history is always a narra..."

I'd say that history is always an interaction between the past and the present, and that it is mostly about interpretation and finding meaning. I think that interaction, while it originates in the present in much the way that the image we see in a mirror originates in our decision to stand in front of the mirror and look, always involves something like conversation between past and present. The actors in the past are not longer living, it's true (even if they historical personages are still alive, they are different now from how they were then), but the past, being far more complex than any one accounting can capture, does, I think, participate in and shape the conversation. To go back to my mirror analogy, what we see when we look in a mirror is as much shaped by the type and condition of glass the mirror is made of, and the material that was used in the "silvering" that makes it reflective, as it is by the image that is standing before it or the (present) lighting in the room. The mirror isn't an actor in the same way that a living breathing creature is, of course. I'm not arguing that the past is something that can sit up and change its own facts/events --the condition of the glass and composition of the silvering, in my analogy--but it is active in what it reflects back to us.

When I was in college and grad school, history as narrative had been out of fashion for at least 2 generations, but the idea of narrative was just beginning to peep back in. I recall the publication of The Return of Martin Guerre making quite a stir for the way it used narrative, and the fact that it was by a woman and about a woman, which made it both fascinating and suspect in the patriarchal university was at. (Side note: that university was where I learned that the more someone boasted about including persons from marginalized groups, the less likely it was that the organization was actually a bastion of inclusion and equity.) I think the social historians started questioning the top-down idea of history before the feminist scholars did, mostly because feminism is a slightly later development. Among English-speaking historians, a bottom-up approach began to emerge in the 50's. Their approach was still considered somewhat radical in many quarters in the late 70's and early 80's when I was a student. My graduate faculty was split between the 65-75 year-old world-renowned men, and the up and coming 40ish men. (Yes. Men. The only tenured woman in my department was president of the university--and the department wanted full bragging rights for that, despite the reluctance to hire and tenure woman as faculty, hence my earlier observation.) The 40ish crowd were definitely more open to bottom-up history, but not nearly as much to narrative. (I thought narrative was important, and I was a woman, and the guy I would normally have worked with was a complete jerk to everyone, so there really wasn't much future for me there.)

I see Sebald as experimenting with that mirror, setting it up at different angles, trying different kinds of glass, different materials for the silver backing,

I sometimes say that is a study of texts. Thank goodness, our idea of what a text is has expanded considerably since the first couple of generations historical scholarship, and now include not just documents written on paper (or clay tablets or computer disks) but all the other traces that people's lives leave behind. Some of the really interesting works of historical scholarship I've read in the last 40 years have used hybrid techniques to try to glimpse what is hidden in the gaps. To see the parts of past human experience that have generally not counted in society's ideas of what mattered, and to bring those parts into the light and give them life.

I read Sebald's book in this tradition: of using hybrid texts & techniques in a hybrid genre to get at something that a straighforward fictional or historical narrative cannot reach, or even may obscure by the very mechanics of its mirror. To me it didn't make sense to spend much if any effort trying to parse which events are "real" and which are made up or deliberately distorted. (Though I commented earlier on at least one distortion that jarred me out of the rhythm of the narrative, I gather from the responses that this is a technique Sebald is known to use.)

I've been out of the academic world since the late 80's, so I'm not up on theory (forays into theory is one of the things I enjoy and benefit from in this group), but I think I pretty much agree with you, RC.

I finished this a little more than a week ago, but have been too tired and distracted (every week here is worse than the last. I've been documenting some of the egregious wrongs in my calendar. Perhaps instead I should write about normal things that haven't yet been corrupted?) or to write a review, so for the moment I'm just going to drop a few questions here. If anyone sees them, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

--I noticed that the narrator dates his final contact with the lives of first two figures to the mid 80's, whereas the final encounter he speaks of with the two last figures is in 1991. That puts the first two segments entirely before reunification, while the latter two have narrative threads that extend past reunification. That might be coincidence, but I doubt it. Reunification was and is a big deal. Ferber, in fact, is still alive in 1991. I wonder if WGS is saying something about the approaches the west and the east took for dealing with their Nazi past.

--I was interested in the elements that linked the 4 sections. Aside from the fact that each man would have been targeted by the Nazi regime had he stayed, gardens that flower and/or fruit are prominent in each. So are mountains both for their scenery and, if I recall correctly, for their sport (skiing, hiking). Nabokov we've mentioned. Each section also stresses abandoned, decrepit, or damaged buildings. I see a progression from the Selwyn home which is lived in but over large for its denizens, to the empty rooms of Mme Landau's villa, to the asylum where Uncle Ambros died being abandoned, to the bomb damage in Manchester. I'm not sure what the significance of these choices is (any thoughts?), but it seems to me that the book is too carefully constructed for the elements to be random.

Finally, America has the sin of race-based chattel slavery in its own past. There are some parallels between that and the Holocaust, it seems to me, as well as some more direct links between the Nazi regime and the Confederacy and and the coup and terror that succeeded it in the South. Unlike post-war Germany, we have never been willing, as a society, to admit, much less try to come to terms with our past. Right now a right wing white supremacist faction is working to rewrite history precisely to erase that past. So this book resonated for me in ways that go beyond the story WGS is telling.

By the way, I noticed that the two narratives in which the narrator quotes extensively from the figure's own diary are the two post-reunification ones. I wondered if the longer story can only be told after that?

Also, I forgot to ask what you all thought about the book ending with the 3 fates. There's the obvious, but since so much in this book is not the obvious, I wondered what others made of that choice.

G wrote: "Each section also stresses abandoned, decrepit, or damaged buildings."

Great questions, G. For me, those images of ruination, destruction, fragmentation and decay are the natural beats of Sebald 's vision and are shared across all his books I've read. It's not just buildings that are exposed to this collapse in e.g. Rings of Saturn as the imagery also extends to human endeavours - sometimes projects that are intrinsically destructive such as the exploitations of colonial Africa, say, or are projects which never come to fruition or which fade away after they do.

Buildings are also sites in Sebald where time can fold back on itself, where we hear and see echoes of history. In Rings of Saturn, again, these echoes are in the eye of the narrator so he carries them with him and imposes them on landscapes to which they don't belong: abandoned railway tracks in e.g. England shimmer into reminders of the system of railways to the camps.

Really interesting your drawing together of slavery in the US with the Holocaust: that's a lovely example of reception where this book triggers comparisons in your mind that wouldn't occur in mine because our historical and political horizons are not the same. I love how that makes literature and reading a living thing.

Great questions G, and great answers RC 👏🏼