Whenever readers despair of contemporary book culture, pointing to the horrors of Dan Brown or EL James; or to the mind-blowing inanities of "writing classes"; or the death of bookselling; or the alleged crimes of Amazon, I have one simple answer: the name of a writer whose life and work – a strange and deep response to the atrocities of history – has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity. His name? Sebald.
WG Sebald first came to public attention in the English-speaking world in about 1996 with the publication of The Emigrants, a haunting mix of fiction and biography, interspersed with odd black and white photographs, a book that defied the conventions of narrative and at the same time triumphantly meditated on the Holocaust and its aftermath.
The Emigrants was followed by two more equally hard-to-classify volumes, The Rings of Saturn (1998), ostensibly about a walk through East Anglia, and Vertigo (1999). By the turn of the millennium, Sebald fever was sweeping the literary world. In some circles, he was being spoken of as a likely Nobel laureate. He himself was just beginning to become a shy, but familiar, figure at some literary gatherings. It was at this time that I first interviewed him for the Observer, a brief encounter now freighted in my mind with delight, sadness, and regret mingled with a fugitive, faint memory of some lovely ironies.
By now, the outline of his biography was familiar. Born in Bavaria in 1944. Studied German literature at Fribourg, with a degree in 1965. Then, leaving his homeland, worked as a research student at Manchester University in 1966. Married in 1967 to his Austrian wife, Ute. In 1970 became a lecturer at UEA, and appointed to a chair of European literature. Finally, the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.
And all the time, while the UEA Creative Writing course had been hogging the headlines, Sebald had been quietly writing The Emigrants, and his other books, in a kind of rare and elevated, quasi-historical, un-contemporary German. After their success in the GDR in the early 1990s, Michael Hulse had translated these books into English, work that was overseen by Sebald himself. The Emigrants was published by Christopher MacLehose at Harvill, quickly followed by The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. Here was a miraculous story of dedicated literary fulfilment in a matter of a very few years, achieved without hype, or hoopla, or any of the antics that can sometimes blight the emergence of a fine new voice. Sebald, who was so hard to categorise, was always very gentle; and his success was gentle, too.
I know all this because this career came to startling fruition in the 1990s, when I was literary editor of The Observer. Sebald's was the story we were all following, as we avidly awaited his next book. By 2000, there was just one more on the horizon, another genre-defying volume entitled Austerlitz.
Then in 2001: tragedy (I remember the day so well). The news came in that Max – as he was known to friends – had been killed in a car crash just outside Norwich. His daughter, who was also on board, had mercifully survived. I went to my desk and, in a daze, wrote a hurried, inadequate "appreciation". Later, we were told that Sebald was probably dead (from an aneurysm) before his out-of-control vehicle had ploughed into an oncoming lorry.
There was widespread shock and incomprehension: a great writer's life snuffed out at the moment when, after the long and almost secret gestation of his gifts, he had finally achieved recognition, an audience, international sales, the possibility of a distinguished future. It seemed like fate's cruellest and most nihilistic reminder of a man's mortality.
But here's the strange, and heartening, thing – and also the riposte to the cultural pessimists (vide supra). Sebald lives on. Uniquely, among so many recently deceased writers, he and his oeuvre have had a rich and productive afterlife. Now only did he, between 1992 (the German publication of Vertigo) and his untimely death (2001), move from total obscurity to international renown, he then posthumously proceeded to influence a whole generation of writers, in the best possible way, as a spirit and an example. Today, the influence of his work crops up all over the place, in the most surprising quarters. Most prominently, in the UK, he has inspired Will Self, Robert Macfarlane, and Iain Sinclair.
More than a decade after his death (he was just 57), hindsight suggests that his extraordinary, genre-bending "method", that's so bewitching and hypnotic, is fully in tune with the spirit of an age that likes to mash up words and music, video clips and archival documents. Without fanfare, he has been one of the first to find the literary means by which to attempt a rapprochement with the horrors of the Third Reich.
Inevitably, it seems, Sebald is also beginning to become a source for documentary film-makers. In 2011, Grant Gee, celebrated for his film Joy Division, made a wonderful documentary Patience (After Sebald) about the author's life in Suffolk (partly inspired by The Rings of Saturn) with contributions from Andrew Motion, Adam Phillips, and many other devotees. Sebald is like that: he awakens the best kind of reverence.
Sebald's influence also lingers, like a benediction, in the world of print. This month, there has been quiet excitement at the publication of a posthumous collection of essays, A Place in the Country. And I am holding in my hand a beautiful, privately printed fragment, in a simple, burgundy binding, Austerlitz and After: Tracking Sebald by Iain Sinclair. It's a standalone off-cut from a larger book, American Smoke, due to be published later this year. Its typography, photographic illustrations and sensibility are inspired by – and make up Sinclair's homage to – Max Sebald.
It's redundant, surely, to observe that Sinclair's Austerlitz and After recalls a lost world in many senses. As a pamphlet, it could have appeared at any time in the last hundred years. Published by Test Centre, a lively London independent, in an edition of 300 copies, with 20 in buckram covers, it will not, presumably, be available from Amazon. So QED: books and culture live on, fighting against the tide. All is not (yet) lost.
