W. G. Sebald

A favorite title? Probably not.

Favorite, right? I mean, you know, probably the obvious choices, Bolaño, Sebald.

Gosh, Celine Henry Miller.

Gosh, there's so many.

I think people do find something in it that speaks to them.

Philip, when did you first read Max Sebald?

Well, I was given the book, I realised, I looked at the inscription and I've got two copies of the Harville edition, which is such a beautiful thing in itself that it makes you want to read it because it is a work of art and the production values are just exquisite.

But I was given it by two really very, very good friends who, one's Adam, who's a filmmaker, another is Neil, who's a singer and songwriter.

And certainly that opening chapter of The Emigrants, which is probably only 20 pages long, anyone who's read that will never, never forget it, I think.

You feel when you come to the first chapter of this book that...

the narrator, because it's important to say one of the things about this book is that the narrator is and isn't Max Sebald.

And his ability to inhabit other voices and other consciousness through this book is one of the things.

[chuckles] Yeah.

Talk to us about W. G. Sebald and the influence on you and the book, and in particular, there's, towards the end of the book, in this discussion between Veronica and her psychoanalyst, a discussion of The Emigrants, one of the books by Sebald, and in particular, the character of Max Ferber and how that pertains to, to memory or, or how that strikes Veronica as being appropriate in thinking about memory.

So Sebald is just a huge-- I wouldn't say that he's exactly an influence because I came to him a little later.

I came to him in my thirties, but he is My, my previous book got compared to Sebald in a review, and to me, that was just, like, the height of...

It was just incredible.

I think about him a lot, and I think about what he does with memory.

Everything about him is so indirect, his writing, but it gets, it gets to you emotionally.

You're feeling through the books as much as you're thinking through the books, and that, to me, is very important.

Like Kazuo Ishiguro writes wonderful first person retrospectives.

I read a lot of Sebald's books, very different emotional tone, but teaching me about how to tell a story as an I.

And Marilynne Robinson also, I loved Housekeeping.

Those were all at the beginning.

But I mean, I do think at, at the end, and this, I don't, and I seem to have been kind of misread in this, um, it seems to be in the criticism.

In turning to Sebald at the end, I've said, "This looks like what we've been talking about, but it ain't the same thing.

It's something quite different." And actually what it really wants is it's a kind of plea for, a kind of desolate plea for reassurance, and that is one thing that the novel wasn't particularly concerned about in the 20th century is reassurance.

When you read Fiedler, part of its brio is the sense that he is dealing with an unquestionable major form that has consequences.

This is a natural inclination to go, and I think that falls out of the book by losing that.

But-

Well, I love Paris Peasant, but I was thinking at the, in the conclusion where you were talking about the influence of Sebald's Austerlitz and the way he uses images as a twenty-first century thing.

But, and for me, it's like Nadja, you know? Like-