‘Kay. A long post today, so let’s begin. No interruptions, please, we can take questions at the end. Last week, we considered the concept of willy wonty and how this structure in a story poses the question: will a protagonist do something or will she/he not. We suggested that other structures may be more successful. “…the most obvious way to create it (tension), is by simply saying something is going to happen, and then putting it off.” “We wonder how and when and why,” (something will happen) instead of if. (Whiny voice—Excuse me, excuse me, Mr. Big Shot, aren’t you making stuff up again?). Pause…Well, you haven’t been around lately. (I was on vacation). At one time, it may have been legitimate to call willy wonty a neologism, yes. Did you read last week’s post? (I was on vacation). I see. (…Mr. Big Shot, since you’re writing this blog, aren’t I a part of you?) Long pause……I wasn’t on vacation last week. Perhaps we could talk about this after today’s post is done. (‘Kay. Wake me when it’s over). Let’s move on and consider another story in Olive, the third, I believe: “The Piano Player” begins, “Four nights a week Angela O’Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Grill.” This begs the question, how and why does Angie play four nights a week at the Warehouse? What does it mean that she does? Also, who the heck is Angie? It does not raise a willy wonty question like: will Angie play at the Warehouse or not? The story (and the narrator) states resolutely that she does play there. Not what will happen, but what is happening. As the story develops, we find that it is very much about answering the question why she is playing there. The story also says a lot about who Angie is and what it means for her that she’s playing four nights a week at the Warehouse. If willy wonty is used effectively, tension and interest are created. But this story doesn’t use willy wonty—is there tension in “The Piano Player?” And is its resolution foreshadowed? There’s tension created by that first sentence—she plays the piano four times a week at the Warehouse—something’s going to happen. What is it? The fact that the story is part of Olive creates some foreshadowing itself. The reader expects that this is a story set in Crosby, Maine and that Olive Kitteridge will appear in it (she does, a walk on). By this point in the book the reader expects that the story will be about the drama of a “small life,” as Pierre Michon would say. It will not be about a heroic or idealized character but an average person leading a “life of quiet desperation.” (who said that?). “If anything, her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age.” So at the start of the story, she’s still expecting something in life, still open, still acting young. The structure is that there is that first line that establishes the story and poses questions. First paragraph does this too. Then a description of Angie, a long paragraph. Then, “On this particular Friday night, Christmas was a week away…” A description of the heavily decorated Xmas tree, rather like Angie. A shift to the thoughts of Joe the bartender, who has realized Angie has stage fright and drinks, the narrator says. “…she had years ago learned to begin swallowing vodka at five fifteen.” First several pages are a lot of exposition about who Angie is, set in the context of her playing piano “on this particular Friday night.” Not much happens till later, but the reader has a sense of tension, that something will happen, because you expect that in a story. There’s the walk-on for Olive and Henry. Walter Dalton is sitting at the bar, a fan, a gay man and a drunk. The reader gets the sense of an audience watching and listening to Angie and her piano. A lot of imperfect tense stuff. “He never bought her gifts and she wouldn’t have wanted him to.” Then, Simon comes in, an old lover. This is the precipitating incident for the story. “…there was something in the way he ducked, or moved, that ever so slightly fogged her mind. But she was shaky tonight.” So at this point we know much more about Angie. She lives alone, has carried on a long-term affair with Malcolm, a married man. She has always cultivated an attractive appearance. Her mother is in a nursing home. She has worked for years as a performer but has stage fright that she manages by drinking. And a man from her past has come in to the bar “on this particular night.” That’s why the night is important and there’s a story about it. She asks for another drink. She imagines talking later to Joe and Walter, “…and she would tell them about visiting her mother in the nursing home today; she might or might not mention the bruises on her mother’s arm.” This is why she’s shaky, although the reason isn’t revealed till the end. The man—Simon—asks her to play “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” surely a meaning-laden song, but she doesn’t. “But it was like she had fallen overboard and had to swim through seaweed. The darkness of the man’s coat seemed to press against her head, and there was a watery terror that had to do with her mother; get inside, she thought.” Foreshadowing, if you please. She takes a break—an unheard of event. She phones Malcom and tells him she can’t do this anymore (their affair). She returns to piano and plays the song Simon wanted. She regards the Xmas tree. “…for a moment felt baffled that people did this to trees—decorated them with all that glitter…in a few weeks the tree would be stripped, taken down, hauled out onto the sidewalk with tinsel still sticking to it…” This may be a mise en abyme sighting—she is like the tree, all dressed up and then discarded by people who only care about her for a time. She thinks about her affair with Simon. He broke it off. “It’s like I have to date both you and your mother. It gives me the creeps.” He was the only man she’d ever told that her mother was a prostitute. She told Simon everything, including that her mother had prevented her from taking a scholarship at a music school. In the bar, he seems unfriendly. Finally he steps up to the piano. “You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You just had to wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.” This is fine writing, free indirect speech? A combination of the narrator’s voice and Angie’s inner voice. She’s thinking about her feelings for Simon, maybe her mother, too. Simon clumsily tells her that her mother seduced him. “And I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for you, Angie, all these years.” He leaves—apparently he came up from Boston to tell her about her mother. Why now? Angie muses that it was to make himself feel better by hurting her—schadenfreude? (pleasure derived by another person's misfortune). Walking home, she encounters Malcolm. He’s abusive, tells her never to call him at home again, only at work. She realizes she’ll never call him again anywhere. She returns to her room, actually to the liminal space of her stairs. We have more free indirect speech—difficult to distinguish Angie’s inner voice from the narrator’s. “A face like an angel. A drunk. Her mother sold herself to men. Never married, Angela?” She decides she’s no less pathetic than any of them. Tomorrow at the bar, she’ll get there early and tell Joe about her mother. “Imagine someone pinching an old paralyzed woman like that.” She had figured something out too late. She would, “… stop thinking about the bruises on her mother’s upper arm, that thin arm with its slack soft skin, so loose from the bone that when you squeezed it in your fingers, it was hard to imagine it could feel anything.” She’s trying to figure out what she feels, she gets drunk to not feel afraid, but it’s diminished her ability to feel anything. The beginning, why does she play four nights a week at the Warehouse? So she won’t feel. She’s abusing her mother but is pretending to herself she’s not. The main event in the story, Simon’s appearance and revelation, breaks through Angie’s denial and causes an epiphany—although not a pleasant one. Four nights a week, Angie has been playing romantic and sentimental songs to please people, and this is a sort of mise en abyme of her life spent trying to please others. This story is about how she can’t do it any longer. She can’t dress up like a Christmas tree and ignore herself and she can’t continue to please Malcom either. He doesn’t please her. Neither does her mother. Questions? #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

The fifth story in Olive, “Starving” begins: “At the marina on Saturday morning, Harmon had to work not to stare at the young couple.” This immediately begs the question, why did Harmon have to work not to stare? What, by implication, was so interesting about the couple? Of course, also, who is Harmon and who is the young couple? The reader might hope the story would answer all these questions. We have some context—because it’s a chapter in Olive Kitteridge, the story will involve Olive somehow and will be set in Crosby, Maine. So how does the story answer the question, why is Harmon trying to hide his interest in the couple? There’s no question of whether or not Harmon is interested in them. He is, it says so. It does not begin, “At the marina on Saturday morning, will Harmon stare at the young couple or will he not?” Or, “At the marina on Saturday morning, Harmon tried to decide whether or not to leave Bonnie for Daisy.” Harmon is an older gent who owns the hardware store in Crosby. He is married long-term to Bonnie but she has told him she is no longer interested in sex. Right or wrong, he is carrying on a casual affair with a woman named Daisy. In his fine book, Writing in General and in the Short Story in Particular, Rust Hills writes about different ways to create suspense and reader curiosity in fiction. “The sort of suspense created by conflict is what Jessamyn West is supposed to have called “willy wonty,” the reader’s uncertainty as to whether a character “will” or “won’t” commit an act, decide a matter, do a deed, choose one instead of another, give up or go on, marry the girl or let her go. Willy wonty can be a wonderfully effective way of getting the reader to read on: it is the suspenseful reaction at its simplest.” However, “…the most obvious way to create it (tension), is by simply saying something is going to happen, and then putting it off.” “We wonder how and when and why,” (something will happen). The couple Harmon is trying not to stare at are Nina White and her boyfriend, Tim Burnham. Harmon encounters them at the local restaurant, what he’s trying to avoid is their physical and sexual involvement with one another—their display of sexuality. Nina is pretty and seductive although strikingly thin. Harmon encounters them again in his store and overhears Nina saying that someone has a “fuck buddy.” Again, he tries to conceal his fascination. He later phones one of his adult sons and asks him the meaning of “fuck buddy.” The answer, his bemused son explains, is that it refers to a casual sexual relationship. Harmon decides this is what he’s been having with Daisy and that it’s not what he wants. He explains to Daisy that he wants them to get to know each other and be more intimate before being sexual. She agrees. Then, by coincidence, Nina appears at Daisy’s house in distress over her anorexia. Harmon meets her. While he’s there at Daisy’s, Olive appears and shocks Harmon, who’s known her a long time, by bursting into tears over Nina’s plight. Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, sat back and said, “You’re starving.” The girl didn’t move, only said, “Uh—duh.” “I’m starving, too,” Olive said. The girl looked over at her. “I am,” Olive said. “Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?” “You’re not starving,” Nina said with disgust. “Sure I am. We all are.” Eventually, Nina goes off to treatment but regrettably dies. Later, Harmon is troubled by encountering an elderly woman, Bessie Davis, at the hardware store. “Harmon felt a rush of anxiety as she left. Some skin that had stood between himself and the world seemed to have been ripped away, and everything was close, and frightening. Bessie Davis had always talked on, but now he saw her loneliness as a lesion on her face. The words Not me, not me crossed over his mind. And he pictured the sweet Nina White sitting on Tim Burnham’s lap outside the marina, and he thought, Not you, not you, not you.” He tells Daisy he’s in love with her and they begin a more passionate sexual affair. “What had begun—not when they were “fuck buddies” but as a sweet interest in the other—questions probing the old memories, a shaft of love moving toward his heart, sharing the love and grief of Nina’s brief life, all this was now, undeniably, a ferocious and full-blown love, and his heart itself seemed to know this…He was waiting now—living in the hallucinatory world of Daisy Foster’s generous body—waiting for the day, and he knew it would come, when he left Bonnie or when she kicked him out…waiting…for open-heart surgery, not knowing if he would die on the table, or live.” So, if we return to the beginning and the question posed by the opening sentence—why does Harmon have to work at not staring at the young couple—we now have an answer. Because he’s trying to avoid love. His journey is from denial of how he feels to acceptance of it. Like Olive Kitteridge herself, he’s been starved for love and dreading loneliness. The story could have been willy wonty—will Harmon connect with Daisy or won’t he—but it’s not structured that way. Ms. Strout directs the narrator not to withhold a secret the way a willy wonty story might demand. Her stance as an author is to say, “Harmon’s love for Daisy is inevitable—here’s how it plays out.” Thank you. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

First, a personal note. For the first time in some sixty weeks, my blog did not have a new entry last Thursday. Readers were, I know, concerned and despondent. But I had no way to reach all of you because the problem was that our internet router failed. With no internet, we were thrown back into a twilight world of reading books and…talking. Well, things have returned to “normal.” The second chapter of Olive, “Incoming Tide,” presents two themes that occur throughout the book, first, the way the past marks the present—often for worse, and second, how people save each other, sometimes quite literally. Olive Kitteridge herself makes an appearance—and, my friends, it is more than a cameo. Incoming Tide is the story of Kevin, who returns to the town of Crosby, where he’d lived till age twelve, with the intention of killing himself. He sits in his car, watching the bay, a rifle wrapped in a blanket in the back seat. “The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them.” Perhaps this opening is a metaphor for a powerful force that inexorably alters things, even things as solid as rock. Huh. After two longish paragraphs, the story shifts to the perspective of Patty Howe, who works in the small restaurant on the bay. She is aware of Kevin sitting in a car, is vaguely disturbed by him, although he is at first unfamiliar. Then, “she suddenly knew who the man was, and something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun.” For Patty had known Kevin when they were both children. Her mother had encouraged her to play with Kevin, and Patty had been afraid of Kevin “and his mother—tall, dark-haired, deep-voiced.” This dual perspective on the same scene is a feature of Olive. Maybe it could be called a way of emphasizing the subjectivity of experience. Different people “see” the same things in different ways, depending on who they are. Another philosophical assumption of Olive is that people are a lot about their pasts. The past claims the characters, shapes them in ways they are aware of but may choose to resist. Back to Kevin. It’s revealed delicately that his mother shot herself to death when he was a boy, and that he discovered her body. The trauma is with him still; he’s tried to have a “normal” life, studying to be a psychiatrist, but suffers from depression and intends to end it all—in such a way that children will not discover his body. Suddenly Olive Kitteridge appears. “…his body jumped a little to see a woman staring through the passenger window, her face close, staring straight at him. “Mrs. Kitteridge. Holy shit…” A great entrance. Olive was Kevin’s seventh-grade teacher. Much to his surprise, she gets in his car. They make small-talk and observe Patty Howe coming out of the restaurant to collect flowers from the shoreline where waves crash against the seawall. Kevin tells Olive that he’s in a residency to become a psychiatrist. After a moment, Mrs. Kitteridge said, “Well your mother may not have been able to help it.” “He felt the strain of some sadness make its way from her to him. Gusts of wind were now swooping in all directions, so that the bay looked like a crazily frosted cake, peaks rising one way, then another…I’ve thought of you, Kevin Coulson,” she said. “I have.” A nice development of the opening metaphor of the incoming tide, as well as wonderful pacing. Tension increases as the current conversation between Kevin and Olive dredges up the past—presented by the narrator who has crawled inside Kevin’s head. Then another paragraph break, and a return to Patty’s perspective. She notices “…Mrs. Kitteridge had joined Kevin Coulson in the car, and it gave her a feeling of safety, having Mrs. Kitteridge with him. She couldn’t have said why, and didn’t dwell on it.” (By the way, here‘s a great example of the narrator telling the story—not Patty who “couldn’t have said why.”) Has Olive gotten into Kevin’s car on purpose because she sensed he was going to suicide? Or is it a more random act that evolves into an intervention? We can only infer the answer as, in this chapter, we have no access to Olive’s mind. Back to Kevin, who wishes Olive would leave so he can shoot himself. She talks about mental illness and heredity, and Kevin thinks about his ex-girlfriend Clara and then how he himself never felt at home anywhere. Suddenly, he doesn’t want Olive to go. He begins to tell her, but at that point, she sees Patty fall into the ocean, the incoming tide. Olive leaps from the car, shouting at Kevin to come help. He does so, jumping into the water without much thought and holding Patty safely while Olive gets more help. “He would not let her go…oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.” This ending moves very close to Kevin’s inner-ness so that it’s difficult to determine whether it’s he or the narrator telling the story. Free indirect speech, we’ve seen it before. (Shhh—it’s a sign of the implied author). So, we have Olive saving Kevin and Kevin saving Patty. Maybe Patty saves Kevin too? Her falling into the sea spurs Kevin—who’s already been saved by Olive—to risk death to save her. He experiences someone who’s desperate to live. Ironic, as Jordan Catalano used to say. I would say, life then, is the powerful force that moves the rocks of Kevin’s resolve. He jumps out of his past to literally embrace life. This issue of how much the past determines the present is big in Olive. We will have to examine it more. Till then. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

This week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008. Ms. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive, and HBO based a four-part miniseries on the story that appeared in 2014. (Worth watching—a fine adaptation). I first read Olive after seeing the miniseries in 2014 and subsequently read all of Elizabeth Strout’s books. As often happens, it’s hard not to picture the story’s characters represented by the actors in the series—particularly Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins—but worse things could happen. Olive is a series of thirteen chapters and each one can be thought of as a short story—in fact, about half of them were originally published as short stories in The New Yorker and other magazines/journals. They are united in two ways: first they all have to do with the lives of people living in Crosby, Maine, a fictional town that seems eminently real, and second, each story involves the character of Olive Kitteridge, some only mentioning her tangentially, others written about her. This structure begs the question—is there a synergistic thingee going on here? What effect does a book have that’s a series of stories about different characters united by their relationships with a central character? And what effect does the order of the stories have? We’ll have to delve into these matters, best beloved. An interesting fact: on the front cover of the 2008 Random House edition, there’s the title and author’s name, a gold circle with the words “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” And below the evocative image of a dried leaf, the word “fiction.” I think it’s interesting that the book designer and publisher thought it necessary to identify Olive as fiction vs. non-fiction or biography. Readers of this blog’s entries on Sebald’s The Emigrants will no doubt smile knowingly. Long time readers of this blog (you happy few) know that I am very interested in the narrative structure of fiction. Olive provides a delightful example of how an author can create a storyteller who is both anonymous in a formal sense, and also intensely familiar. A voice that is not the flesh and blood author, but an entity whom we imagine telling us the story. (The reader may well imagine it is Ms. Strout herself telling the story, an impression abetted by the author’s photograph on the inside jacket—an image of a smiling middle-aged woman. I say—NO! It’s not her! It’s a separate entity. Long time readers of this blog might say (perhaps in a whiny voice) what’s the difference between these dang entities? What the heck are you talking about? What I’m talking about are distinctions between at least three entities. There is the real author, Elizabeth Strout, who wrote Olive Kitteridge and labored mightily to get it published (thank you). There is the book’s narrator, in this case, an essentially anonymous voice that tells the story in consistent and beautiful prose. And there is the implied author. The implied author can be thought of as a personality a step removed from the narrator, an imaginary entity whom the reader assumes is responsible for decisions about the type of narrator—that is, there are many types of narrators; first-person, second-person, narrators that are actual characters in a story, narrators that are nearly invisible and anonymous, and so on. The implied author can be detected in all the details of the story’s style; not only the type of narrator but verb tense, language choice, chapter divisions, perspective, etc. As I said, the reader may imagine the implied author is simply Ms. Strout and be done with it. It’s a fuzzy distinction at best. The point is that Ms. Strout has written other stories and books that—while they do have a consistent style—are dissimilar in the ways that make Olive a consistent work. Although written by the same author, Olive Kitteridge is distinct from My Name Is Lucy Barton. It is not hard to detect the narrator. “Three hours ago, while the sun was shining full tilt thought the trees and across the back lawn, the local podiatrist, a middle-aged man named Christopher Kitteridge, was married to a woman from out of town named Suzanne. This is the first marriage for both of them, and the wedding has been a smallish, pleasant affair…So far, the polite cheerfulness of the guests seems to show no sign of running down, and Olive Kitteridge…is thinking it’s really high time everyone left.” So here we have the narrator telling us things that the characters might or might not be aware of—the sun is shining. The local podiatrist is named Christopher—would he think this about himself? Probably not. It’s the first marriage for both bride and groom—again, they may think this about themselves but not in the way it’s presented in the story. Real people might have occasion to think: “I’m me—the sum of my sensations and memories. I’m the podiatrist around here—the local podiatrist, and I’m getting married. The sun is out. I haven’t been married before, neither has Christine.” Maybe if a real person met someone new and wanted to explain what was going on: “Hello. I’m Christopher Kittridge, and I’m marrying Christine. It’s pretty sunny, eh? I’m a podiatrist, haven’t been married before. That’s my mother Olive over there. She always looks that way.” Yes, in this chapter, “A Little Burst,” Olive appears in the first paragraph. She’s described as thinking it’s time the wedding was over, impatiently, perhaps—described as feeling this way, not shown as feeling this way. “When is this damn thing going to be over?” Olive thought,” would show it. The whole section (as well as the whole book) is in the storyteller’s voice—not the characters’. Beautiful imagery and simile that does not typically occur to real people. The protagonist of the second chapter, Kevin, is looking at the harbor. ”The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.” This is the narrator’s voice—unless Kevin is very poetic, which he doesn’t seem to be. There are wonderful descriptions of complex, ambiguous emotional states. “Henry stands up, Daisy Foster fleetingly through his mind, her smile as she spoke of going dancing. The relief that he just felt over Denise’s note, that she is glad for the life that unfolded before her, gives way suddenly queerly, into an odd sense of loss, as if something significant has been taken from him. “Olive,” he says.” Again, this is the narrator describing Henry’s inner state in its own words—not Henry’s. ‘Kay. Next week we will plunge further. A slippery slope? Maybe. Till then. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

I have said that, in Emigrants, Max Sebald relied for content on the stories of real people, including an unnamed narrator who was similar to the real author, Max Sebald. However, although the stories were accounts of peoples’ lives, he added fictional elements to the narrative. I’m going to say that this creative process is similar to the process a painter uses in creating a painting. Recently, I visited the Frick Collection and reveled in the experience of standing close (not too close!) to Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Whistlers (among others.) (whiny voice: How pretentious.) Vermeer created lovely images, usually of people indoors, people who were engaged in something. You get the sense looking at these paintings that you’re seeing a story, that along with the painting’s title, you can make meaning of what the “people” in the painting are doing. So that, in Mistress and Maid, a well-dressed young woman is seated at a table, and an older woman, perhaps a servant by her attire, emerges from the shadows to hand the seated woman a letter. The imagination can run wild with this. It’s possibly a love letter, entrusted to the servant to deliver in secrecy. The painting picks out this moment, removing the sense of time, making it eternal. It organizes the figures in a certain way, shows them in a certain way, as far as the color of their clothes, the tones of their skin, their posture. The background of the painting is in deep shadow, so that the eye focuses on the foreground where there is a play of light. The faces of the woman and the servant are full of expression: expectant, surprised, excited. Were these “real” people observed by Vermeer? We don’t really know. They do not seem to be particular, named individuals whom Vermeer was hired to portray. Perhaps they were models showing a certain scene or transaction the artist found of interest. In Emigrants, Sebald employs a similar method, albeit in a different medium. His models were “real” people whose stories he embellished with various fictional instead of painterly techniques (more on this below), in order to create a work of art, not a biography or history. He chose a particular focus, picking out a “story” from the randomness of real life, a story centering on the experience of emigrants, of loss and despair. Here’s a further comparison with painting, best beloved. (Must we? And I'm not your best beloved). In the Frick in its current home at the Breuer in NYC, you can experience a room full of the finest in eighteenth century English portraiture, Reynolds, Romney, Beechey (yes, Beechey). These are mimetic images of particular people. If you knew these folks, you would recognize that the paintings were of them. They were famous and/or wealthy enough to commission the paintings. They’re beautifully done, and with the passage of time, have become more “art” than portrait—as we contemporary humans don’t always know who the subjects were. Then in the next room there are four paintings by Whistler that I think are much closer in spirit to Emigrants. They are of particular people, perhaps commissioned (I don’t know), but their titles are things like “Arrangement in Brown and Black,” and clearly focus less on the people depicted and more on the arrangement of color, the form, the look of the clothes and faces. They seem more posed—not in an artificial way, but artistic. They create a mood and show people who seem familiar, beautiful and provocative. Like Emigrants, best beloved. So what fictional techniques does Sebald use? One is a completely reliable, assured and intelligent narrator, who is able to draw on a wealth of literary and cultural knowledge to present the stories. When the narrator of Emigrants relates that he and “Clara” drove out from Norwich to rent an apartment, the reader has no reason to doubt its accuracy. However, some digging reveals that Sebald’s wife was not named Clara, and that the real house “they” rented was in a different town. “Real” people are not infallible; they distort the stories they describe, and are rarely (some say never) the narrator beasties encountered in fiction. There’s nothing wrong with this “fictionalization”—unless the author is writing biography and/or history—or gives no warning that she/he is making stuff up for the sake of a good story (for the sake of art). If one writes a text that is classified as “fiction” the reader assumes that some artistic license has been taken, even in the most realist of books. Real life is not story-like; real life has a lot of coincidence, and is not neatly contained by story-arcs and plots that resolve. Real life doesn’t really resolve. (Maybe that’s why fiction is so enjoyable). Repetition and mirroring is another “Sebaldian” fictional device. There is an eerie mirroring among the stories of Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, Max Ferber and the narrator. In Max Ferber in particular, the narrator’s story blends with Ferber’s to such a degree it’s hard to distinguish them at times. The author of Emigrants has selected four stories that show something about his theme—the plight of the dispossessed, what the emigrant has lost. The style of Emigrants is another technique, beautiful and digressive prose that captures more of the associations and meanderings of human consciousness than the imposed order of historical writing. And the evocative photographs which often appear to show particular elements of the narrative. Thus, as the narrator describes reading the journal of Ambros Adelwarth, there is a photograph of an old journal. It might or might not be Ambros’ “real” journal. ‘Kay. A great experience to read. Next week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Till then, my friends. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

The last section in Emigrants is entitled Max Ferber. Here, our narrator is a youth in his early twenties who escapes life in Germany “for various reasons,” he says, by journeying to 1966-era Manchester, England to be an exchange student. Rather than the city he imagined, he finds himself in a bizarre, deserted, spectral place of ruined nineteenth-century buildings and grime. In keeping with the book’s theme of exile and emigration, he describes the eeriness of the plane flight from Germany, his first sight of Manchester: “By now, we should have been able to make out the sprawling mass of Manchester, yet one could see nothing but a faint glimmer, as if from a fire almost suffocated in ash. A blanket of fog that had risen out of the marshy plains that reached as far as the Irish Sea had covered the city, a city…inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive.” He has the anxiety-provoking experience of going through British customs in the middle of the night—this and the plane flight, and the first sight of a destination, are all experiences familiar to travelers and emigrants. In the early morning, the city is described: “Views opened up across the wasteland toward the still immensely impressive agglomeration of gigantic Victorian office blocks and warehouses…that had once been the hub of one of the nineteenth century’s miracle cities, but, as I was soon to find out, were now almost hollow to the core…the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum.” A taxi driver takes him to the Arosa Hotel—Arosa is a town in Switzerland, but also means “gentle awakening” in Gaelic. After a prolonged period of knocking, the hotel owner, Gracie, finally opens the door. She is described as having a Lorelei-like air. Lorelei— a beautiful maiden who threw herself into the Rhine River in despair over a faithless lover and was transformed into a siren who lured fishermen to destruction. “And where have you sprung from?” she says to the narrator “…only an alien would show up on my doorstep at such an hour on a blessed Friday morning with a case like that.” The hotel is described as “…a maze of dead-end corridors, emergency exits, doors to rooms, toilets and fire escapes, landings and staircases.” Gracie brings him the “teas-maid” machine, a combination alarm clock and tea-maker. “…it has often seemed…as if the tea-maker brought to my room by…Gracie…that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation in which I might well have become deeply submerged.” Gracie calls it an “electrical miracle.” Gracie would carefully count the hotel profits (cash in 1966) in an obsessive manner and leave Sunday morning to deposit it, not returning till Monday mid-day. The narrator reports: “…on those Sundays in the utterly deserted hotel I would regularly be overcome by such a sense of aimlessness and futility that I might go out, purely in order to preserve an illusion of purpose, and walk about the city.” There are some very mixed messages here—is the Arosa a “gentle awakening,” and if so, awakening to what? Gracie is siren-like (dangerous) but gives the narrator a sort of magic artifact which saves him from despair. Eventually in his wandering, the narrator comes upon the studio of Max Ferber. “In one of these deserted buildings was a studio which, in the months to come, I visited as often as I thought acceptable, to talk to the painter.” From here, the story swings into Max Ferber’s tale of escape from the Holocaust. At the end, things return to the narrator who receives a manuscript from the possibly dying Max Ferber and goes on a long walk around Manchester, searching for artifacts of Ferber’s life. The story concludes with the narrator describing a photograph in the manuscript of “three young women, perhaps aged twenty…I sense that all three of them are looking across at me…I wonder what the three women’s names were—Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuna and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.” Nona, Decuna and Morta were the three Roman goddesses of fate, who spun the web of human destiny. So the narrator is imagining the photo he’s observing is an image of them, with the implication that human destiny is controlled by fate instead of will—a significant philosophical stance, no? What’s going on here? In technical terms, it could be said that the narrator’s story is a frame-story, in that it surrounds the chapter’s story of Max Ferber. The first chapter, Dr Henry Selwyn, also has this structure, wherein things begin and end with the narrator. There are considerable, almost alarming degrees of repetition and mirroring between the narrator and Max Ferber. Both men, of different ages, tried to flee the experience of the Holocaust but found themselves in Manchester, England, a city that curiously surrounds them with reminders of the horror and devastation they struggled to escape. Is this perhaps the point of the story—that human lives are controlled, not by personal agency, but by fate? P’rapps so, best beloved. Next week, let’s look a bit more at Max Ferber’s story and summarize. Till then, you happy few! #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

The third section of Emigrants, Ambros Adelwarth, is all about revenants, people who return, people who are thought of as dead but come back anyway. The section begins with the narrator speaking—almost as if he were being interviewed. “I have barely any recollection of my own of my great-uncle Adelwarth.” This distinction “of my own” is critical, as the narrator learns about his great-uncle—who died when he was a child—through other family members’ stories, photographs, and from a journal kept by Ambros Adelwarth himself that the narrator’s aunt gives him. Ambros lived in America at the end of his life, although he was the epitome of the emigrant, or exile, in that his life was characterized by constant re-location, going from Germany to France, to London and Japan, America, and a long trip to the Middle East, a return to Europe and finally to America where he died in Ithaca, New York in 1953. There are other reasons why he is the quintessential emigrant that we will delve into, best beloved. The narrator describes not knowing much about Ambros till 1981, when the narrator received a photo album belonging to his mother that showed family members who had emigrated to America from Germany in the 1930s. The narrator says: “The more I studied the photographs, the more urgently I sensed a growing need to learn more about the lives of the people in them.” He takes a flight to Newark, rents a car, and drives to Lakehurst, New Jersey where his aunt and uncle live. It’s worth noting that this is twenty-eight years after Ambros’ death—a long time that the narrator does not account for. In other words, why now? Probably because of the needs of the book, the process of “fictionalization,” as Sebald calls it. His aunt and uncle tell him about their experiences of emigration, his uncle saying, “I often come here, (a local beach)…it makes me feel that I am a long way away, even though I never quite know from where.” Gradually, his aunt reveals she is “haunted” by her uncle Ambros, and begins to tell the narrator about Ambros’ life. He worked as a servant, albeit an elite one, for most of his life, traveling the world. He was employed by a wealthy Jewish-American family on Long Island, and became a sort of companion to the families’ eldest son, Cosmo. Ambros was gay—as Uncle Casimir relates, “Of course…he was of the other persuasion, as anybody could see.” In this way, he was doubly alienated—first as a non-Jew working for a Jewish family, and second as a gay man living in the first half of the twentieth century. The narrator finally receives Ambros’ journal, which is an account of a trip he took with Cosmo to the Middle East. The journal is presented, and the verb tenses shift from past to present. There are two types of memory addressed in Ambros Adelwarth, indeed in Emigrants in general. The first is somewhat implicit—regular utilitarian memory that allows the narrator to function in the world, remembering his plane tickets, his keys, the address of his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. This kind of everyday memory makes our worlds full, giving a sense of continuity through time. It is reassuring. It’s the kind of memory we associate with pleasant things, the stories we tell that give depth and meaning to our existence. “I remember the time I went to—" Well, we don’t have to get into all that. The second kind of memory is not so pleasant and preoccupies Emigrants. The end of the chapter and of Ambros’ journal says, “Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking down the receding perspectives of time, but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” This is the memory expressed by the revenant, the ghostly reminder of the unsettled past, which gives no relief or comfort. The experience of being haunted by specters or ghosts. The narrator’s Aunt Fini comments about Ambros…”the things he said he had witnessed…seemed so improbable that I supposed he was suffering from Korsakov’s syndrome…an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions…the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became…After Christmas ’52 he fell into such a deep depression that although he plainly felt a great need to talk about his life, he could no longer shape a single sentence, nor utter a single word, or any sound at all…telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself…and mercilessly destroying himself.” What is going on here? Ambros exhibits a symptom of those who have survived trauma, an inability to let go of the past, an affliction that affects his sanity. Yet, as described by the narrator, he did not have a particularly traumatic life. He did not fight in wars, did not endure the Holocaust and WWII, which is a major theme of Sebald’s. I believe he is Sebald’s proxy for people who have suffered in these ways. His life, as presented in Emigrants, shows the discomfort of memory compulsively remembered. Indeed, all the stories in Emigrants express this theme. Memory—for Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber—is a burden that cannot be carried. As the narrator says in Dr Henry Selwyn, “But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.” A sentiment which could express something pleasant, or something ominous. Uncle Casimir has this kind of dark and weighty memory when he speaks of feeling that he’s a long way away, even though he never quite knows from where. Aunt Fini describes how, after Ambros is unable to tell any more of his memories, he leaves his house in Mamorneck, New York, and voluntarily enters a private psychiatric hospital in Ithaca. Back in the present of the story, the narrator leaves his aunt and uncle’s house to travel there. Although the asylum has been closed for years, he meets Dr. Abramsky, who was the assistant to Dr. Fahnstock, the director of the hospital. The narrator learns that Ambros was treated for depression with electro-convulsive therapy, a treatment that gradually erased his memory. “Kay. Next week, we’ll look at some aspects of the final section of Emigrants, Max Ferber. Don’t forget! Till then. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

Last week, I wrote about how Emigrants can be seen as the story of a narrator’s reactions to encounters with four different people—except that reaction is not shown beyond a basic point, and must be inferred by the reader, which may, as a result, invite her/him to experience their own reactions. This post proved to be controversial, with strident demands for clarification and elaboration, so here goes. Dr Henry Selwyn, the first section of the book, ends with the narrator saying, “When we received the news, (of Selwyn’s death) I had no great difficulty in overcoming the initial shock. But, certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.” An interesting comment. After having shared seemingly profound things with Dr Selwyn, the narrator “had no great difficulty” in overcoming the shock of his death. There’s no explanation for this; perhaps the narrator was preoccupied with other pressing matters, perhaps the connection with Dr Selwyn wasn’t so important (that seems unlikely—why write about it then?). Perhaps Sebald is trying to convey the way Selwyn himself had lost his past by denial and forgetting. Sebald goes on to describe how years later he was traveling in Switzerland and saw particular mountains Dr Selwyn had shown him in slides from a vacation. “At that point, as I recall, or perhaps merely imagine, the memory of Dr Selwyn returned to me for the first time in a long while.” He glances at a local paper he’d bought and sees the story describing the discovery of the mummified remains of Johannes Naegli, an Alpine guide, missing since 1914, which have been exposed by a retreating glacier—the same man Dr Selwyn had described as his closest friend. The section ends, “At times they (the remains) come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.” An elegy perhaps—not so much for the hapless Naegli, but for Dr Henry Selwyn, although the narrator does not describe this reaction, leaving it to the reader. Similarly, at the end of the next section, Paul Bereyter, the narrator is interviewing Lisa Landau, Paul’s companion later in life. She describes an anecdote Paul had told her about how an uncle had predicted Paul would “end up on the railways,” meaning that, due to his fascination with trains, he would eventually be somehow employed on them. The irony is enormous, as Paul killed himself by lying on a railroad track. “When Paul told me this perfectly harmless holiday story, said Mme Landau, I could not possibly ascribe the importance to it that it now seems to have, thought even then there was something about that last turn of phrase that made me uneasy. The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant—I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death—that lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight.” That is the end. One can only imagine the narrator’s reaction listening as Mme Landau relates this tragic story—only imagine because we don’t really know how he felt. We are left with our own feelings—for me, both stories provoked a feeling of awe at the tragic irony of life. At the intensity of human connection and the pain of separation and how people recover from loss. And sometimes don’t. Last week, I raised the question: Did Paul betray the narrator by suicide? We could ask the same question about Dr. Henry Selwyn. Last week, trying to “copy” Sebald’s method, I left the answer(s) open for the reader. A commendable maneuver, but perhaps more is needed. In Emigrants, it’s no accident that Sebald described four lives that ended in suicide (okay, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber were a bit different but both have the theme of the narrator exploring their lives after their deaths—okay, Ferber is still alive at the end. Okay, stop). I believe what he was trying to show was that these four led lives of displacement and despair they could only escape by death. The suicides were certainly not directed at the narrator as acts of anger—so could the narrator experience them as betrayal? There is no direct reference to this. As I read about Dr Selwyn and Paul Bereyter and their deaths, I feel sadness. To live one’s life and at the end, choose destruction seems particularly tragic. I think the people closer to Selwyn and Paul—perhaps Selwyn’s wife and Mme Landau—might indeed have felt betrayed. But Emigrants provides layers of insulation so that we the readers are shown lives at two degrees of remove. We are reading the account of a narrator showing tragic lives. The stories are quite a bit about the narrator’s realization he didn’t really know the departed. We are not reading a novel that shows the intensity of their inner experience, their consciousness. All we have to go on are the photographs, the interview transcripts, and the stories, stories that show us things about ourselves. Next time, we’ll move on to the curious exploration of the life of Ambros Adelwarth, Sebald’s actual great uncle. Till then. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

A theme I’d like to pursue in thinking about this remarkable book, is that Emigrants is (among other things) about the effect on the narrator of learning the more complete lives of the four men in the story. However, that effect is not spelled out beyond the clear implication that the narrator was very moved by learning these fuller stories. It is left open, so that the reader’s own reaction is not constrained by the narrator’s. In conversation with Dena, (always a pleasant activity), I got excited over the idea that maybe the character of Paul in the second section of Emigrants, is similar to the implied author of a novel. By way of review, the implied author is an entity “distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. Dena and I were talking about Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, who may have disappointed her readers by divorcing her husband—after the book’s warm climax of finding love with him—true love, the reader was led to believe. But apparently, the real Elizabeth was a different person than the persona or implied author she created in the book. Some might say this was treachery—maybe if you present a book as being your real story, you are vulnerable to being accused of lying if it isn’t. But Eat, Pray, Love was clearly marked as memoir, no? Last week, we considered whether Emigrants is fiction or something else, as it’s based on “real” experience. (Why do you keep putting the word “real” in parentheses? It’s annoying). I concluded that there was a strong element of fiction in this work. Sebald himself talks about a process of “fictionalization” of “real” events and people. (Please respond to my complaint.) In Paul Bereyter, the reader is told a story by a narrator who receives disturbing news. “In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life.” A train came out of the darkness, and he had lain down on the railroad tracks outside of town. The narrator, who for years had thought of Paul as the best teacher ever, is devastated. “…in the end, I had to go beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know.” He sets out to learn what he can about Paul from family and friends, in order to understand how such a positive man could destroy himself. And he discovers that Paul’s excellence as a teacher may have been an attempt to overcome a dark past. Paul was partly Jewish, and his family was persecuted by the Nazis; Paul himself was curiously drafted into the German Army and served during WWII. He suffered from mental health problems and deteriorating eyesight which eventually forced him to give up teaching. Like all the characters in Emigrants, he was afflicted by a feeling of not belonging anywhere. Just as a reader might have a strong reaction to Elizabeth Gilbert’s being a different person than her character in Eat, Pray, Love, the narrator was disturbed that Paul Bereyter might be different from the image he had of him as the “author” of a significant part of his childhood. Of course, the narrator in Emigrants is not a “real” person. (Oh, no. Here we go again. And in typical bully style, you’re ignoring me). It’s an illusion that he’s “real” just as there was an illusion that Elizabeth Gilbert was “really” the protagonist of Eat, Pray, Love. (What?) The narrator believes Paul was the same person he’d come to know in school, just as the reader of fiction thinks the author is the same person who wrote the book. But Paul’s death tips the narrator off to the illusion. He presents Paul’s more complete story, and the reader is invited to react. Let’s revisit our old example of the Dick and Jane stories. I’ve written before about how, as a child reading those books in the first grade, I had no idea of and no interest in who the author, William S. Gray, was. I suppose I had a vague idea that Mr. Gray might actually be my teacher, Miss Schroeder (who I had a crush on, but we don’t have to get into that). What if I had learned, or learned in this present, that Mr. Gray was an alcoholic loner who finally killed himself? A survivor who wrote children’s books to deal with the trauma of intense WWII combat? How would this affect me? I might feel betrayed. I might feel grief. I might decide it didn’t really matter, that the texts were what were important, no matter who wrote them. At least I learned how to read. If I were like the narrator of Emigrants, I’d embark on a program of research into Mr. Gray’s previously hidden life, trying to understand and document its complexity by interviewing his survivors. Did Paul betray his students by hiding his pain? Did he betray them by killing himself? Was what was of real importance the way he helped and inspired his students? (A lot of questions). Yes. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

In Amazon’s system of classification, Emigrants is found under literature and biography, and the promotion says the book combines elements of biography with fiction. It is a somewhat jarring experience to begin reading the book, perhaps with the expectation that it is fiction, because the four stories, combined with the black and white photographs, that comprise the narrative have such a sharply realistic quality. The photographs in the Henry Selwyn section seem to follow the text closely—except for the enigmatic one of a misty church graveyard. It leaves you guessing: Were Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber real people? If not, who and what are the photographs of? The first section, Dr. Henry Selwyn, concerns a man whom the narrator—who never mentions his own name—meets while looking for a place to live. The narrator refers to himself as “I” and curiously is accompanied by someone named Clara—the real Sebald’s wife’s name was Ute. In an interview with James Wood, Sebald says that Selwyn was a real person, and that Sebald met him and learned more about his life by interviewing family members. It would seem then that this is a story about an encounter with a real person, an account of what this person said about himself, of what others said about him, and of the thoughts and feelings he provoked in the narrator. Is any of it invented or fabricated? Yes. Does that make it fiction? Maybe, best beloved. That is a difficult question that gets at the issue of what fiction is. Jacques Ranciere in his book, The Edges of Fiction writes: “What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality.” He goes on to discuss Aristotle who said that history presents how things happened as isolated, particular events, whereas fiction talks about events that do not occur at random but in consequence of a chain of cause and effect. The gods or fate do not cause this chain, the actions of the protagonist do. And these actions must be contrary to what the reader expects—there is always a reversal, a peripeteia that must be resolved. There is nothing here about whether or not the events “really” occurred, rather that, in fiction, they are shown to be caused by humans. By this definition, Emigrants begins to look more like fiction. In Dr. Henry Selwyn, Dr. Selwyn reveals certain aspects of his life to the narrator. He welcomes the narrator and “Clara” into his home and allows them to observe his eccentric lifestyle. He tells the narrator about his life and how he is “homesick” for his childhood, spent in a different country. He was taken to England when he was seven and grew up there, assimilating in a successful manner, even changing his name. He erases his origins and marries, not telling his wife who he really was. And now, in old age, he mourns his past and is unable to be comfortable in the house he lives in, his place of exile. He feels he doesn’t fit anywhere and can only spend his time with animals and plants. After the narrator moves on, Dr. Selwyn shoots himself. One could describe this man’s life as a biographer or historian would—the significant events, the places lived. The people known. Sebald focuses on the way in which Dr. Selwyn adapted to a new country. He rejected his old one and changed his name and identity. He worked hard to become a physician and was successful. Reading this story, one might expect him to continue to meet success, have a family and a career. Happiness. But that is not the case. Dr. Selwyn gradually loses interest in his marriage and his work as a doctor. He becomes melancholy and reclusive, eventually retiring to the dilapidated estate where the narrator encounters him. His life does not go according to plan. He is unable to escape being from somewhere else and feeling, as a result, that he doesn’t belong anywhere. In the interview with James Wood, Sebald responds to the question, is The Emigrants real? “Essentially, yes, with some small changes…Dr. Henry Selwyn, for instance, lived in that house, not in Hingham, but in another village in Norfolk. His wife was just like that, Swiss and very shrewd. She’s still alive, I think and so is Elaine, their most peculiar maid.” Selwyn did have a Swiss mountaineering friend but it was not Johannes Naegeli, whom Sebald read about in a magazine. “It just needed a tiny rapprochement to make it fit…The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l’effet du reel.” In a piece about the process of translating Sebald, Michael Hulse shares a letter he wrote to “Max” as he calls him, where he expresses concern that Emigrants might be fiction. “That fiction and imagination are in some manner involved I do not question, but it matters to me to locate them within the documentary aspect of your texts, as a token of your dedication to your quest for these lives…where (does) the literal truth stop and your imaginative re-creation or addition begin?” Sebald responds: “Fictionalization, as I see it, is, in this text not a matter of substance, that is to say it is nothing to do with making up characters, events that befall them and complicated plots. Rather, the sense of fiction, the feeling that one is at a level removed, by a notch or so, from reality is meant to come out of adjusting the focus of the telescope one looks through, so that some things seem very distant and others (especially those which are in the past) quite close and immediate. ‘Kay. Next week, we’ll go deeper into the story. Till then. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

This week, a new story, The Emigrants by the late German author W.G. Sebald. I’m reading Michael Hulse’s 1996 translation of the 1992 original in German. Austerlitz was the first book I’d read by Sebald, followed in rapid succession by The Emigrants and Vertigo, then later The Rings of Saturn and his essays. Although Sebald was fluent in English—he taught at a university in England most of his life—he left translation to others. Translation was key to the success of Emigrants in America and other English-speaking lands. Michael Hulse does a wonderful job—I’d have to speak German to appreciate all his artistry, but I offer the opening sentence of the first section of The Emigrants as an example: “At the end of September 1970, directly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” A beautiful sentence, with great drive and rhythm. It very neatly answers the questions when, where, how, and why. It also introduces a key theme of the story—the search for a place to live. All the book’s characters are emigrants from somewhere else and struggle with feelings of not belonging. The story has four sections of unequal length. Each presents a narrator—never named, but who seems to be rather like Sebald himself—telling the story of four men: Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. Each contains a similar theme of emigration from and loss of a homeland. I would like to examine each section in detail, but today, I want to consider some aspects of Sebald the writer. Recently, I watched Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novak’s excellent documentary on Ernest Hemingway and learned about how Hemingway actively created a persona or avatar, as the filmmakers call it, who was the imaginary author of the writing, the imaginary Ernest Hemingway—different from the real human and,—by the way—immortal. Authors of fiction always do this creation, but some more so than others and more willfully. W.G. Sebald (called Max by those who knew him) seemed to be an author who actively created less of a persona but as a result, invited more speculation. In barebones, we know that Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and grew up in the aftermath of WWII. He emigrated to England and taught European Literature in the city of Norwich, writing and publishing many fine works of literary criticism before his first work of fiction, The Emigrants, in 1992. This won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal and met with considerable acclaim, particularly after it was translated into English in 1996. Sebald wrote three other works of fiction; his final book Austerlitz, is regarded as his masterpiece. He was married, had one daughter, and tragically died at age 57 in a car accident in 2001. That’s about it. There are some fascinating interviews available as well as several books of criticism and essays. But the Sebald or Max who exists as an imaginary writer the way Hemingway did is elusive. There are a number of photographs—in fact photography plays a major role in Sebald’s writing—something we’ll get to later. The pictures of him show a serious man of middle age, often wearing wire-rimmed glasses, chinos and a wrinkled shirt. He had a thick, graying mustache and was rarely smiling. Nothing heroic, or Hemingway-esque. An intellectual perhaps, someone who was very focused on memory and writing. He was sometimes shown studying a dog-eared paperback. The interviews with him focus on his writing, not his biography. He downplays who he was. There are no statements I can find of this sort: “Sebald loved to force his way into European libraries brandishing a camera and automatic pistol. He’d insist on copying the most delicate and treasured manuscripts, sometimes beating hapless staff members with a dog-eared paperback till he got what he wanted. However, he was equally skilled at charming his way out of the resulting trouble with the authorities, often by drinking them under the table.” (Whiny voice. Mr. Big Shot, Avatar was a science fiction movie. I’ve got you this time, you literary bully. You made all this up, just like always). What I’m attempting to talk about is how images of authors exist for their readers—whether they create them or not. Our society creates avatars of authors, partly as a way to sell their work, partly because readers want to get to know a version of who they’re reading. (You have a mustache, so did Hemingway. You’re the one who’s copying.) I can say for myself that while reading Emigrants, I was curious about who Sebald the author was. I learned what I could and essentially formed an impression of him as a scholarly man, someone who was very sensitive and not interested in celebrity. Someone who loved books and writing. Was this the image Sebald wished to present? Probably. Was it close to who he really was? I think so, but am not certain. Next week, I want to talk about whether the form of the Emigrants is fiction or something else. Till then. And I do have a mustache and beard—they are mine, not Ernest Hemingway’s. I like to be fuzzy. #TheEmigrants #W.G.Sebald

I'm pleased to announce my story "The Loss of the Whaling Ship Pequod" is now live on the Blue Lake Review site. Here's a link: https://bluelakereview.weebly.com/the-loss-of-the-whaling-ship-pequod.html Many thanks to Blue Lake's Editor, Mitchell Waldman, and to Will Allison, who edited the story. Yes, there is a Moby Dick reference here, but the story isn't really about whaling. #AlanBray #BlueLakeReview