Recently, “Vertigo”
by W.G. Sebald, his first novel. A huge fan of this writer, I couldn’t put down
“The Emigrants” and “The Rings of Saturn.”
So much here,
tailor-made for a writer searching for simplicity of voice. What happens?
Pretty much just the interior narrative on a cultured man – questing, forever
questing.
I could make a
list of the gems I’ve found in the past few months but today (Aug. 28) I’m all
about how Finding Sebald couldn’t have come about at a better time.
Consider these wonderful
observations in “Vertigo,” amazingly pertinent comments to our strange social-political
moment:
“Liken a lucid
mind to a glass, which does not break of its own accord. Yet how easily it is
shattered.”
“Machines alone
have realized that sleep is no longer permitted.”
And most nakedly,
“Ceaselessly, in
great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth or our cities,
rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of a frenzy when the roar reaches
its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the
next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For
some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that life is
being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction,
just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.”
(That last quote could serve
as the ideal epigraph for THE OVERSTORY by Richard Powers …)
Next: Running for Your Life: Troubling Parallels
