Free Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer Page B

years the rite was known as the “Day of Hate.” Now, in more hopeful times, it is called the “Day of Memory.”
    1999

DEAD MAN WALKING
    The classic travel writer takes us on a quest, even if he doesn’t know exactly what he’s after; with the haunted German wanderer W. G. Sebald, the dominant impression is always that of flight. A flight from the past, and from all that he has suffered there; but also—agonizingly—a flight into the past, since everywhere he goes, whatever he sees, and whomever he meets reflect back to him precisely the world he’s trying to put behind him. There’s no escape. With the classic traveler we generally feel that we’re being taken by the hand and led out into the world; with Sebald (so uneasy he can’t even acknowledge to us that his journeys are a fact, nonfiction), we are always looking back even as we move forward, like cursed figures from an ancient myth.
    You get a sense of this predicament—flight not as liberation, but as compulsion—as soon as you pick up the latest of his books to be translated into English. The dust jacket of
Vertigo,
at least in the British edition, tells you, not very helpfully, that it belongs to the genre of “Fiction/Travel/History.” The table of contents, even in translation, offers two sections, out of four, with Italian titles. The author refuses to give us his first name, in the style that now seems archaic, and his alter-ego narrator will check into a hotel room under a name not his own. Sebald has lived in England for more than thirty years—teaching literature, no less—and yet he chooses to write still in his native German.
    Clearly, you gather, his sense of identity is slippery and his theme, at some level, is all the things he cannot speak about (he was born, the book’s cover tells you, in Germany, in 1944). And as soon as you open the cover and fall into his restless nightmare of a journey, you find you are moving with no hope of orientation or forward motion. There is no sense of home around you in his world, no sense of family, or community, no sense, even, of a settled reality. By page 4 you are being introduced to weird drawings of “horses that plunged off the track in a frenzy of fear” during Napoleon’s Italian campaign in 1800; by page 5 you are moving into a “light that is already fading.” The thrust of the opening section is that nothing is what it seems: most of what the “perennial traveler” Stendhal remembered about the Napoleonic campaign he accompanied never happened.
    Then the curtain rises on the second section of the book, and the never-changing Sebald narrator, the author’s double in a sense, comes out from the wings and takes us into the voice, the theme—the world—that are fast coming to seem Sebaldian: “In October 1980 I traveled from England, where I had been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county that was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.”
    Though
Vertigo
is the third of Sebald’s books to be translated into English, it is the first of them to have been written, and so lays out the foundations for what increasingly seems to be one long, lifetime’s work that could be called
À la Fuite de Temps
Perdu.
In all these works, a narrator, in all ways indistinguishable from the author, takes off on long, unsettled wanderings, in pursuit of some riddle that will not leave him alone. He mixes up his travels with portraits of other enigmatic wanderers and misfits, and the text is broken up at regular, irregular intervals with cryptic photographs, copies of receipts from trains or restaurants, maps taken from old books. Uncaptioned, and bearing only the most oblique relation to the text around them, the scraps serve only to intensify the sense of placelessness and silence.
    There are few other beings in this desolate, black-and-white world, and those we meet are as disconnected as the