{"id":1153,"date":"2010-09-25T13:42:59","date_gmt":"2010-09-25T12:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1153"},"modified":"2010-11-23T13:00:09","modified_gmt":"2010-11-23T12:00:09","slug":"will-self%e2%80%99s-new-walking-to-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1153","title":{"rendered":"in Sebald’s shadow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"After Chatwin, a book that in some ways could not be more different – Will Self\u2019s new Walking to Hollywood<\/em>, which I\u2019m also reviewing<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 Compared to Chatwin\u2019s self-consciously lean prose, Self is baroque, fecund and profuse – in fact, rather like that, always using three adjectives when one could do.\u00a0 But both share a common interest in travel writing as essentially fictive.<\/p>\n

Walking to Hollywood<\/em> is heady stuff and the book has some brilliant flashes of genius as well as of over-indulgence.\u00a0 One shadow looms large over it \u2013 that of WG Sebald, the German writer who lived for many years in England and died in 2001.<\/p>\n

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; \u00a0he also pronounced his name to rhyme with \u2018pay-cult\u2019 (rather than \u2018see-bald\u2019), thereby elevating him to the pantheon of those writers like Borges whose name can only be pronounced properly by initiates …<\/p>\n

His main thesis was a good one – that we have adopted Sebald as a “good German” whom we, as equally good liberals, gave succour to on these shores.\u00a0 This ignores both Sebald’s and our far more complicated relationship to the Second World War:\u00a0 Sebald’s father was a card-carrying Nazi;\u00a0 while as Sebald pointed out, the British bombing raids over Hamburg and Dresden merit far more self examination than they have received.<\/p>\n

Even The Rings Of Saturn<\/em> – his book walking along the East Anglian shoreline that I nominated as one of my five favourite travel books <\/a>of all time – is seen by Self to be far more about the Holocaust than one might think.<\/p>\n

Self’s own \u2018psycho-geographic\u2019 travel has a graciously acknowledged debt towards Sebald, whom he describes in a typically baroque\u00a0 phrase, as \u2018rubbing away at the palimpsest<\/a> of history\u2019 (the Kindle will be perfect for Self readers, so they can quickly look up all those dictionary definitions…). \u00a0At the close of this new book, Self emulates Sebald by walking along the crumbling Yorkshire coast.<\/p>\n

For me, Sebald sometimes seems to examine moments of the past as if they were strange bits of flotsam washed up on the shore \u2013 and with a commensurate detachment, helped by the excellent way in which his translators have preserved the coolness of his German prose.<\/p>\n

Not that Sebald was a saint, as Self points out.\u00a0 His death may have lead to a certain canonisation, just as with that other great writer of East Anglia, Roger Deakin.\u00a0 But Sebald was not above some acts of writerly cannibalisation – with his appropriation of the character of Frank Auerbach for a novel, for instance. Or, according to Ronald Blythe, with his unacknowledged plagiarism of local Suffolk historians.<\/p>\n

Self was a brilliant lecturer \u2013 passionate, informed and with enough range to his gravel back-filled voice to hold his audience for well on an hour.\u00a0 He saved his greatest scorn for what he saw as the hypocrisy of Tony Blair in signing the UK up to the international Holocaust Day;\u00a0 if we really wanted a Day of Atonement, he said, we should think of a day\u2019s silence a year for the victims we killed needlessly in Dresden and Hamburg \u2013 or for that matter, Iraq.<\/p>\n

See the print version of Self\u2019s lecture on Sebald<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An audio version of the lecture is also \u00a0available <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Chatwin, a book that in some ways could not be more different – Will Self\u2019s new Walking to Hollywood, which I\u2019m also reviewing.\u00a0 Compared to Chatwin\u2019s self-consciously lean prose, Self is baroque, fecund and profuse – in fact, rather like that, always using three adjectives when one could do.\u00a0 But both share a common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[67,66],"class_list":["post-1153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-wg-sebald","tag-will-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1156,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions\/1156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}