The Rings of Saturn

"I think the key thing is to approach it without trying to think, what genre is this? What’s interesting about this book is that it was published in German first, in 1995. Sebald’s books were first written in German, even though he taught at the University of East Anglia and was a citizen of Britain for a long time. And his books defied categorisation at a time when travel writing was the genre of the day, the way ‘New Nature Writing’ is reaching its peak today. Now, it’s a celebrated genre, the bookshelves are full of New Nature Writing. Robert Macfarlane, as you know, has been at the forefront of this. Before that, in the mid- to late-20th century, it was travel writing. You had writers like Bruce Chatwin, Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, people like that. But as you got to the end of the 20th century, travel writing as a genre hit rock bottom. Chatwin was, like Macfarlane, a literary celebrity as well as a writer. I think he was less shy than Macfarlane, though. He died in his late forties, from Aids, in 1989. After that, he started to be criticised because he made stuff up, embellished characters. People he wrote about objected to the way they’d been portrayed. He was vilified for not being accurate. Here we come back to this fiction/nonfiction thing. His book The Songlines was nominated for the Thomas Cook Travel Award, but he withdrew it because, he said, it was fictional. Later you got people like Tony Hawks going around Ireland with a fridge…. It got ridiculous. Then, at the end of all this, you have Sebald writing The Rings of Saturn . Is it a travel book? Is it memoir? Is it fiction? Is it history? I mean, it’s everything. It’s a book about time, it’s a book about space. It is a book about walking. But it’s also much more than that; it’s a journey of the mind as well as a journey on foot. He was really a psychogeographer. He burst open this idea that travel writing had to fit into a neat category. Right, he does describe the landscape, but all through the prism of his mood. He’s low, he’s been in hospital, he’s quite depressed. He talks about how feeling unwell colours his rather bleak view of the landscape. The weather’s not very nice. It’s not a conventional celebration of the landscape. But everything around him triggers a great journeying in his mind, which is absolutely fascinating. You’re journeying around his head, and his immense knowledge, more than you journey around the landscape. The traditional travel narrative is a linear journey—an outward journey and an inner journey that takes place at the same time. In this case, the inner journey is more important than the outer journey."

"Book number four is not exactly an art book, but it contains pictures. It’s by W G Sebald – The Rings of Saturn. Sebald is interesting because he published all of his books with photographs in them, and this one is interesting because it’s kind a Wordsworthian walking trip. The character, who is and is not Sebald, walks along the east coast of England and finds odd places, odd people, odd things. It’s just a rambling narrative of geography, literature and objects and it’s punctuated, as are all of his books, by these odd little photographs, which often don’t appear to bear any relationship to what’s in the text at all. I think Sebald was actually sued a couple of times for copyright infringement, because he just photographs things out of books and then sticks them in his novels. They’re not good reproductions. They’re quite small, black and white, often blurred – like bad photocopies or pictures out of a newspaper. He breaks all the rules. He just sticks a picture in the middle of the page. At times they illustrate what he’s talking about, but just as often they don’t. They add another layer, but sometimes it’s hard to say exactly what that layer actually means. As a novelist, I think he’s spawned a whole industry which theorises the relationship of pictures to words."

"Writing about Kafka, Borges observed that “each writer creates his precursors”. Of all those liberated by Chatwin’s trampling of fence-posts, and empowered by his example of zig-zagging through time and space, none stands higher than WG Sebald, whose last piece of writing before his own untimely death was actually about Chatwin. One can recognise Sebald’s idiosyncrasies in Chatwin’s earlier work, and yet, to paraphrase Borges: “if Chatwin had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.” He died young, but not as young as most people think. At 48, he had outlived many of his influences: Robert Louis Stevenson , TE Lawrence, Anton Chekhov , Robert Byron, Arthur Rimbaud. He died of AIDS – one of the first well-known figures in England to do so – but denied in public that he had it. His denial bred a sense that if he lied about his life, he must have lied about his work. Some readers have taken this as a cue to pass judgement on his books – or else not to bother with them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It deserves repeating that Chatwin’s medical reports confirm that he said nothing he was not given leave to believe by his doctors. At the time he fell ill – the mid-1980s – all sufferers of AIDS had HIV, but it was not known for certain whether every person infected with HIV automatically contracted AIDS. The disease, which had appeared in New York in 1981, was relatively new to England and still “mysterious and shameful” in the words of the gay writer Edmund White, one of a number of men who had sex with Chatwin. Whatever Chatwin’s private fears during this period of profound public anxiety, it is unfair to judge him for any pronouncements that he made once his brain had been poisoned. By the time his HIV had developed into full-blown AIDS, he was much like his description of Rimbaud, who died in a Marseilles hospital in 1891, “mumbling in his delirium a stream of poetic images which his sister Isabelle, though she had paper and pencil to hand, did not think to write down.” Like Hemingway , another of his influences, Bruce Chatwin has spawned a lot of imitators, but like Hemingway he’s a one-off."