in Sebald’s shadow
After Chatwin, a book that in some ways could not be more different – Will Self’s new Walking to Hollywood, which I’m also reviewing. Compared to Chatwin’s self-consciously lean prose, Self is baroque, fecund and profuse – in fact, rather like that, always using three adjectives when one could do. But both share a common interest in travel writing as essentially fictive.
Walking to Hollywood is heady stuff and the book has some brilliant flashes of genius as well as of over-indulgence. One shadow looms large over it – that of WG Sebald, the German writer who lived for many years in England and died in 2001.
Reading it, I was reminded that earlier this year I went to hear Self give an intriguing lecture on Sebald – whom with the intimacy of a familiar he called Max; he also pronounced his name to rhyme with ‘pay-cult’ (rather than ‘see-bald’), thereby elevating him to the pantheon of those writers like Borges whose name can only be pronounced properly by initiates … …