I had an anniversary during the week . Not a birthday or wedding. It was the anniversary of something that cannot be committed to memory . It is both past and the present. This led to the writer W G Sebald . I read Austerlitz, the Rings of Saturn and the Emigrants years ago. In fact I bought two copies of the Emigrants - I left one half read on the Stansted Express.
Sebald is held in high regard amongst literary folk. Before his death in a car accident in 2001 Susan Sontag considered him one of the few examples of literary greatness in English. Look up " Why you should read W G Sebald" in the esteemed cultural rag The New Yorker. I cannot improve on it.
Though I read them 10 years ago this books are ever present. His prose is both elliptical and opaque. There is no plot, few characters and no action. The subject matter is part fact, part fiction . The prose is accompanied by black and white photos which do not illustrate but enrich and comment on the text . He created his own literary form. I urge you to investigate.
In Austerlitz his protoganist states "I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.”
The anniversary I mentioned above is the loss of someone. I don't agree with Austerlitz but his assertion haunts me.
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