The first major study of revered author and academic WG Sebald reveals an obsessive and brilliant mind
WG Sebald’s mother Rosa once said that her son had been born without a skin, so that he was unable to protect himself from being overwhelmed by the suffering of others, and even normal experience was traumatic for him. For Carole Angier, author of this unauthorised biography, something about this acute sensitivity made Sebald “the most exquisite writer”, a man oppressed by experience and the burden of his mind, who believed that the remembering of great injustices was an attempt, however small, at what he called “restitution”.
In Janet Malcolm’s memorable dictum, biographers are burglars, robbing the lives of their subjects. But what Angier realised, as she embarked on her own pattern of theft, was that she was dealing with the most light-footed of all burglars. For Sebald’s books, a mixture of history, fiction, memoir and biography, are also heavily stolen from friends, family and acquaintances, leaving many of them furious and aggrieved. As Peter Jonas, former director of the English National Opera and a close friend of Sebald’s, put it: “He wasn’t just a listener. He was a recording machine.”
Angier’s task was not an easy one. The fact that Sebald’s wife and daughter wanted his life to remain private, which meant that she could quote only very little of his letters or even his published work, was clearly a huge drawback. The intimate life is inevitably sketchy. To compensate, she has done a meticulous job of research, both in Germany, where Sebald was born, and in England, where he lived for much of his adult life, interviewing hundreds of friends and colleagues, scrutinising every scrap of his voluminous writings, and unearthing the identity of many of the characters whose stories he used. She visited every place he ever lived or spent any time in and delved into the backgrounds of his many friends. She quotes another dictum of Malcolm’s: “We do not own the facts of our lives … this ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.” The result, if somewhat overlong, is fascinating. As she says, biography is a question of joining holes together, and her skills as a joiner are formidable.
His books are unlike any others, in their fascination with coincidences, the way things hang together in forms we don’t expect