The Voice Over

That’s why everything is so important. The instinct to catalogue, which Sebald himself willingly calls bourgeois, turns out here to be a kind of salvation; the passion for listing becomes a good deed. Dates are important, the names of cafés are important; the names of places are important (and of plants, the ones who keep quiet in this world—Sebald feels a particular, respectful tenderness for them). The invisible shadows that stand behind every text are important; sometimes it’s impossible not to notice them—thus in The Emigrants there’s a flash of Nabokov with his butterfly net at every turn of the plot; sometimes you notice them only when a greeting from Sebald’s childhood ricochets off into you—thus I pause over every page where I see the name of Würzburg, a green Bavarian city with an old Jewish cemetery. The newspaper clippings are important, the restaurant tab and the ticket for admission to the Giardino Giusti in Verona are important. All the constant elements—there are almost more of them than the inconstant ones—are important, but in a different way.

Some motifs, phrases and words in Sebald’s prose are ineradicable, they float up here and there like life buoys, at every free exhalation. They include trains, and relocations, and women reading in trains; one of them has a book titled The Seas of Bohemia that is predictably missing from all the world’s amazon sites. (An American reviewer of Vertigo was surprised that the hero-narrator could contrive to watch two obviously attractive young women bent over their reading for hours without even trying to get acquainted with them.) Here I won’t deny myself the pleasure of quoting an excerpt from a brief essay published long before the author’s death.

During the journey she was reading Kafka’s travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time looking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka describes one of his fellow travelers cleaning his teeth with the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that not because the description was particularly remarkable, but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any inhibitions at all.²²

That is how description works in Sebald. All that, along with the little mica window where, hugely diminished, Kafka can be made out in a train car as it moves into the distance, is visible just as if through binoculars held backward: with comical precision, in the cosmic ice of completedness, which preserves any accidental link forever.

It’s no sin to state an obvious thing about Sebald one more time: what he’s busy doing is called rescue of the drowning, of all things and all people excluded, crowded out and subject to crowding, of those losing their meaning, of all those displaced and forgotten persons of world history, of everything that disappears, from people and peoples to obsolete crafts and gas lamps. And it has significant consequences. In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything uninteresting, which is invariably deprived of the right to a reader. Some people seem to have a preeminent right to our interest, and that right can’t be challenged—because they’re beautiful, and famous, and talented, and this or that happened to them—and because the accepted ethics allow us to be selective. This is most visible in reading biographies: we obediently and sympathetically flip through the first ten or so pages—where we learn about the hero’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers—until we get to the magnetic zone of real interest. What can you do? It’s a natural human trait: “interesting,” like “tasty,” can’t be faked—it can only be disregarded. What Sebald does is a kind of soft, almost speechless revolution: we see the floors collapse and the snowy dust pour down. He doesn’t try to persuade you that uninteresting is the new interesting. He doesn’t insist that you ought to feel bored, as his guild colleagues often will.