Backlisted - The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

W.G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn, first published in Germany in 1995, is the subject of this episode. Joining John and Andy to walk around this enigmatic masterpiece are the writer and swimmer Philip Hoare and the novelist Jessie Greengrass. Other books under discussion are The Years by Annie Ernaux and Fiona Benson's award-winning poetry collection Vertigo & Ghost.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)4'36 - Les Années by Annie Ernaux8'51 - Vertigo and Ghost by Fiona Benson15'03 - The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us wandering the coastal lanes of Suffolk, peering down from a crumbling cliff towards the bleached hulk of an old fishing boat poking from the sand, the marram grass

rustling in the wind like silk, a sense of uneasiness pervading everything. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and we're recording today in a bathysphere. Yes. We're not normally in this room. What do you think?

I think it's quite good. It's kind of appropriate, as you'll see, for the kind of the resonance of the text that we're here to discuss. So joining us today is Philip Hoare. Hello. Hello. Philip is a broadcaster, curator, filmmaker and writer whose books include biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward, the historical studies Wild to Last Stand, Spike Island, The Memory of a Military Hospital, which is a particularly good one. I wonder why. I wonder why. Studies Wild's Last Stand, Spike Island, The Memory of a Military Hospital,

which is a particularly good one. I wonder why. I wonder why. Full disclosure, listeners, I edited that book with Philip. The quality of it is nothing to do with me and all to do with him. And England's Lost Eden, his book Leviathan or the Whale, won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and his most recent book Rising... If I may say so, Philip.

One of my favourite books ever. Thank you very much. Kind of you. I can go now, can't I? That's it. We're done. That's what I came for. And his most recent book Rising Tide, Falling Star

is published by Fourth Estate. Philip presented the BBC arena film The Hunt for Moby Dick and directed three films for BBC's Whale Night. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton and co-curator of the Moby Dick Big Read, an amazing thing, which you should check out at mobydickbigread.com. He also goes swimming every morning at what time? Three o'clock. Depends where the tide is and sometimes three and what do you have as a reward for your swim you were telling me five

ginger biscuits that's amazing and all before 5am a long time before 5am and how long have you done that routine that's been it's only been getting kind of really quite extreme in the past five years really just as I get to know I didn't learn to swim until I was about 29 in fact just down the road from where we're speaking down in Haggerston Baths so I'm making up for lost time amazing also joining us today is all the way from Berwick-on-Tweed the writer Jessie Greengrass hello Jessie hello Jessie is the author of two books her short story collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Ork According to One Who Saw It,

won the Edge Hill Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and was enthusiastically praised by my colleague John Mitchinson in the episode of Backlisted devoted to Against Nature by Huisman. So you can go back and check our bona fides on that. And her novel novel site was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for the women's prize and the james tape black memorial prize and long listed for the welcome prize jesse lives in northumberland with her partner their two children and what time do you get up in the morning because of that uh about half past five

yeah but i mean maybe i should get up an hour earlier and go for a swim every morning. I feel like I'm being lazy now. And what happened to you on the train? Exciting news today, Jessie. Oh, I finished my book. Hooray! Your next book.

You heard it here first, everyone. The new Jessie Greengrass novel, which will be published at some point in the future. Although I have to go back to the beginning and read it through. It might be terrible. I don't know. Yes. Yeah, I think it's very unlikely that it will be terrible. Anyway, the book that Jesse and Philip are joining us to discuss today is The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, better known as Max to people who knew him. First published in German by Eichborn-Vellag in 1995 and in an English translation by Michael Holtz by the Havel Press in 1998. But before we wander off towards Suffolk, John,

what have you been reading this week? Well, it seems to be the week for masterpieces. I've been reading a book that has blown me away. I expected it to be good, but I don't think I expected to enjoy it in quite the visceral way I did. It is Les Années, The Years by Annie Ernaux, a French writer with a fantastically prize-winning reputation.

In this book, I think she won the Prix Renaud d'Homme in France and the Premio Strega in Italy. And in 2017, she was awarded the Marguerite Jossena Prize for her life's work. It is a kind of an autobiography, and I say a kind of an autobiography because we're about to talk about the man who dissolves boundaries between genres.

Nothing I've read in recent times has done that as well as Annie Ernaux has done here. It is a memoir that stretches from 60 years, from 1940 to now. And what she does in a very different way from, let's say, Georges Perec, you know, the Je Me Souviens, you know, I Remember, but similar in the way that it's a bricolage of sensual memories, of brand names, of it's also technology you know starting off with with writing and going right through to there's a very funny bit at the end playing on the nintendo

wii with grandchildren so it's a it's an attempt to write a genuinely kind of meaningful autobiography without falling into the usual traps. She says towards the end of the book that by retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of history. So it's incredibly ambitious. And yet it works like a dream. At one level, you can read it as a sort of race through 60 years of French culture and the development of a human being's emotional life, intellectual life, spiritual life, but also it's everything that's going on around her. It's a really, really, really profound book.

And how long is it? Exquisitely translated. I'll tell you how long it is. It's 225 of your English pages. It's exquisitely translated by Alison Strayer, who's a Canadian translator. I mean, I don't read, my French isn't good enough to read it anything but haltingly.

I'm going to read you a very small passage from José Ortega y Gasset, but all we have is our history and it does not belong to us. All the twilight images, a lot of the book is finding photographs and remembering the moments. All the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life and you walk down indefinable roads. The image of Scarlett O'Hara dragging the Yankee soldier she has just killed

up the stairs, then running through the streets of Atlanta in search of a doctor for Melanie, who was about to give birth. Of Molly Bloom, who lies next to her husband, remembering the first time a boy kissed her, and she said, yes, yes, yes. Of Elizabeth Drummond, murdered with her parents on a road in Lourdes in 1952. The images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way into sleep. The images of a moment bathed in a light that is theirs alone. They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents,

dead for half a century, and of the parents also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories, our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day, we'll appear in our children's memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history. That'll probably do. Oh, that's good.

It's published by Fitzcarraldo, isn't it? It's published brilliantly in the Fitzcarraldo as a memoir, but it is as interesting and is stimulating a book as I've read all year. And now Andy, what have you been reading? So I've been reading a lot of poetry this year, as regular listeners will be aware. And I read a book two weeks ago, which is as good as any poetry that I've read this year from any era. And I was going to talk about this book anyway. And then it was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry a week ago. And then a couple of days ago, from when we were recording it,

won the Forward Prize for Poetry for Best Collection. And I don't tell you that, listeners, as a way of saying, oh, my eye is pretty good. I tell you it because it's almost self-evident when you read Vertigo and Ghost by Fiona Benson that you are reading what is probably going to be thought of as a classic. And I wouldn't say that lightly, just as I don't use phrases like, I couldn't put it down lightly.

I do think this has the makings of a classic. Certainly it engages with our current historical moment. There are two parts to this collection, the first of which rechannels the Greek myths of Zeus as a transformative power into zeus as it says here on the jacket flap as a serial rapist for whom women are prey and sex is weaponized it is extremely distressing funny Impressing, funny, clever. I almost want to say I like it despite the framework of the Greek myths because as Fiona Benson has said, she was slightly worried that the Greek using the myths would cushion the blow,

would put a scaffolding or a fence around the things that she wanted to write about. And it's a mark of the brilliance of this, that A, that doesn't happen, and B, I am not entirely comfortable with reading out most of the first half of the book here on the podcast. I urge you to read it. It's one of the most dramatic and affecting things that I have read this year, poetry or not. In the second half of the book, it becomes an intimate and moving document about family life and, I think, depression. And I'm going to read a poem from late in the sequence called Hide and Seek. And what I would say to you is this has some upsetting stuff in it. So you might want to go forward a few minutes, about two minutes.

But I think this is a remarkable piece of work. Hide and Seek. After her swim, I wrap my child warm and take her to the changing room and lay her down to dry. and lay her down to dry. She holds the corners of the towel up over her face, like a soft turquoise tent, and yells, hide and seek, hide and seek. I lift an edge and shout, boo, and she shrieks with laughter. I can feel the heat rising from her body and smell the chlorine. She hides again, and again I peek under and she's beside herself with happiness. She's at an age where she thinks that if she just stands still in the middle of the lawn, I will not see her, that somehow she is gone. But always, in the pockets pockets behind this game, there is this residue, this constriction, families squeezed behind false walls or hidden under the floor. I think of the soldier sensing the hollow under his soul and

prying up the board on all those cramped and flinching humans. But mostly, I think of the mothers, their hearts jumping out of their mouths, trying to shush their children. My firstborn now, who's never been able to do as she's told, how she'd have writhed and screamed and bitten like a cat if I'd tried to hold her quiet, how I'd have hurt her, clamping her mouth,

trying to keep her still. The trap door is always opening, the women and children are herded into the yard, and I ask myself if, when my daughters were pulled from me, I would fight and scream to keep them or let them go gently, knowing there was nothing to be done. If we were pushed into the showers, would I pretend it was only time to get them clean? We are not meant to write of the shower, we who were not there. But on bad days, it's all I can think of. The mothers trying to shield their children with their bodies under the showers, screaming for mercy, begging for rain. And it's never over. Here are the children riding to the border in fridges as the air becomes hot and thin, their tiny bodies glowing like bright sardines on the custom officer's handheld scan. And here is the tribesman carrying your husband's genitals and a

bloody machete, and you are a mother running for your life with a baby tied to your back and two children by the hand, but one small son is falling behind. Jesus fucking Christ. I don't know who I'm teaching you to hide from, but look how eagerly you learn. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. The Rings of Saturn. adverts stay tuned to this the rings of saturn jesse let me ask you first can you remember when you first read this book or where you first came across say about work yeah so this was the first of his books that i read and it must have been 2002 or 2003 and i've been trying to remember who gave it to me i think that it might have been my mum or it might have been a very good friend of mine and I think that at the same time they both sort of suggested that I read it.

And it was very peculiar. My grandparents have always lived on the Suffolk coast, so very much in this sort of area. And my grandfather was in the Merchant Navy and then later on became a river pilot up up the thames estuary um and he left school very young and was um was completely self-educated so he would go off on these voyages and he'd pick a subject and that would be the subject that he was going to learn about on this voyage um so he knew an extraordinary amount of stuff and he would take me when I was a child to all of these places we'd go to Dunwich we'd go and look at all the Roman roads and when we

went there we would kind of sit in the car and then we'd get out of the car and he would just talk to me about all of these things that he knew so when I first read this book it was so kind of familiar and it felt so personal it felt like this book was kind of written like not to sound terrible but it did feel like it was kind of written for me specifically and reading it again um I wonder how familiar how how whether that's quite common actually because it's so so there's so much in it it's so elusive so depending on your particular kind of areas of interest I wonder whether lots of people will read it and think, gosh, this is specific, this is for me. People's response to Sebald's work and to this book in particular

is so deep and passionate. I think you're right. I think people do find something in it that speaks to them. Philip, when did you first read Max Seybold? 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. People who I really respect and have been part of my creative life. They've been really part of my creative life. So I knew this was a weighted gift. It was for my birthday, 2000.

So I knew I had to take notice. And I was actually halfway through writing that book for you, Andy, Spike Island. Indeed. And I mean, I don't know whether you were conscious. I mean, I don't know whether I was conscious, but it changed me as a writer. And I mean, it changed the way I was writing. I was writing this book about this military hospital, which was built a huge quarter of a mile long building built on the shores of Southampton Water, close to where I live. And it was kind of active retrieval. I didn't really know how I was going to write this book. And both my friends thought that this would be helpful.

I don't know whether it was helpful, actually, because it's rather like when Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne. actually, because it's rather like when Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville started writing this grand adventure of the South Sea fisheries, the whale fisheries, and thought he was going to write a real blockbuster. Then he meets Nathaniel Hawthorne and Storm and Drang and the Salem Witch Trial and every kind of dark Gothic thing falls upon Melville's shoulders and he creates Moby Dick. And that's kind of what I've been doing ever since reading that book, right? Just it's that sense of something so intimate,

so physically intimate, the cyclical nature of it, the endlessness of it. Last year, I reread it last year. I was so pleased to be asked to do this because I reread it last year because I'd had a long operation. I had a three hour operation in which I was conscious. Throughout this operation, I'd been speaking to the surgeons and you're really high because you are like on all sorts of stuff, which is running through your body. thinking about Max because I said, have you ever seen Rembrandt's Dr. Toltz's Anatomy Lesson? We don't usually discuss culture in here. And I had this vision of myself, you know, like being described by Max lying on this table and un-aetherized on the table, because I wasn't aetherized, you know. And when I got back home and I'd lied because they say, have you got someone at home to look after you? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And of course I hadn't. And I woke up and I realized I was floating in this weird world and I didn't know what to do. And I knew my means of salvation was to go back to the rings of Saturn. It was a solace. It was a solace. It was the only thing I could because books you know are like friends they betray you after a while uh and i wondered whether this book had betrayed me

but it hadn't i i can i just flag the listeners i that i think is my favorite thing any guest has ever said on an episode of this podcast today so already we're operating at a high level. Philip I remember the creative process behind Spike Island being intense in the best way that you were forging as you saw it new ground whenever you came back to the material and really as an editor my job was to try and make a judgment on when we had reached the peak moment, right? And I can remember you talking about reading Sebald, so I'll vouch for your memory there.

I'd also like to say that I first read The Emigrants and the Rings of Saturn in 1997 because I was given copies by Max's publisher John Mitchinson. Indeed. John do you want to tell us a bit about how you first read Sobel? Well I should say I was one of the team at Harville. Bill Swainson was the was the commissioning editor. I first discovered Soobel on a flight to America reading the manuscript that had come in of The Immigrants. And it was that very rare thing that happens when you're in a publishing house and you, by the time I got disembarked at JFK, I knew we had clearly a masterpiece. It was just something that was so unique and original. I remember very clearly we managed to persuade Waterstones to adopt it. In those days, to get a Waterstones Book of the Month,

it was voted on by the shops. So I wrote handwritten letters to every one of the 200 or so Waterstones managers saying, this is a masterpiece, please, please, please support it. And they voted for it. And I still remember ringing Max's wife saying, he's not here. I said, well, could you tell him that it's going to be Waterstones Book of the Month?

And she said, oh, Max will be thrilled. Well, as thrilled as Max is about anything. Yes, we're going to listen to some clips of Max's brilliantly lugubrious voice later on. But the next book, which was this book, was kind of the one that you could, I don't know, I was saying this to Andy the other day, I feel that The Rings of Saturn is like a kind of the fruiting body

of a vast mycelial network. And it means so much to so many different people. It can be read in so many different ways. One important publishing story that's connected with it is that the book in German has a subtitle, which is called An English Pilgrimage. And we decided that we didn't want to call it that, because we felt it would close the book down in a way that Max didn't want. I mean, famously, Max wanted it to be in every single category going we had to settle with three which was fiction history and travel we should remind ourselves and listeners that the rings of saturn the emigrants and vertigo

are all novels although are they novels we'll we's Max Seybert talking about the issue of truth in his work. There's the possibility for the same sleight of hand that makes crime fiction possible because it can be all arranged retrospect. So I had the clipping, I only needed to invent the character that goes with it and associate him with the main figure in the text. In this case, it happens to be true. Most of them are true, but there are several which I made up. And so, you know, the reader must be constantly asking, is this so or isn't it so? And of course, this is one of the central problems of fiction.

The 19th century authors are always at pains to point out that they found this manuscript in a bedroom in Husum, and therefore it's true. They're not telling a story they've made up. They're recording real life. And of course, in a a sense we still have that problem as narrators and many writers fudge it or obscure it when you first read it jesse do you remember stopping and thinking to yourself what is this book

um no but i do remember thinking oh god like, like what a relief. It doesn't matter actually. And I really thought that's it, we're done. We've done with that. We don't have to do that question anymore. The world has opened up. We can write books in which people just think about things. If only that brave new world had occurred. I don't think I want to know.

I don't think I'm interested in it. I think it is a book which is about so many things and obviously it is kind of incredibly well constructed and thoughtfully put together, but reads as though it is just somebody sort of thinking to themselves over the course of an afternoon. It feels now the same way that it felt when I first read it, that it is the future in some way.

If we could all sort of figure this out, then we'd be let into a world in which we could kind of relax those boundaries and stop worrying so much about whether things are novels or not. Could you read us a bit? Did you choose a passage to read? Yeah, I did. Quite a short passage.

So this is, I don't know, about a quarter of the way into the book. And I've got some notes here because I was thinking, how can you, one of the difficulties of picking a passage is kind of jumping into it. There's always something that went beforehand. So I thought, well, I'll try and explain what's been going on and and this is a bit in which he he remembers being in Southwold looking at the sea uh remembering being in the Hague looking at the sea from the other side and he'd gone to the Hague to look at this picture the anatomy lesson which in the book he's already

mentioned several times in connection with several other things. So you've already got the sense that it's this kind of enormous network. It's extraordinary. And this is what he says at this point. Diderot, in one of his travel journals, described Holland as the Egypt of Europe, where one might cross the fields in a boat and, as far as the eye could see, there would be scarcely anything to break the flooded surface of the plain. as far as the eye could see, there would be scarcely anything to break the flooded surface of the plain. In that curious country, he wrote, the most modest rise gave one the loftiest sensation, and for Diderot there was nothing more satisfying to the human mind than the neat Dutch towns with their straight tree-lined canals, exemplary in every respect. Settlement

succeeded settlement, just as if they had been conjured up overnight by the hand of an artist in accordance with some carefully worked- out plan, wrote Diderot. And even in the heart of the largest of them, one still felt one was out in the country. The Hague at that time, with a population of about 40,000, he felt was the loveliest village on earth. And the road from the town to the Strand at Scheveningen, a promenade without equal. It was not easy to appreciate these observations as I walked along Parkstrat towards Scheveningen, a promenade without equal. It was not easy to appreciate these observations as I walked along Parkstrat towards Scheveningen. Here and there stood a fine villa in its garden, but otherwise there was nothing to afford me any respite. Perhaps I had gone the wrong way,

as so often in unfamiliar cities. In Scheveningen, where I had hoped to be able to see the sea from a distance, I walked for a long time in the shadow of tall apartment blocks as if at the bottom of a ravine when at last i reached the beach i was so tired that i lay down and slept till the afternoon i heard the surge of the sea and half dreaming understood every word of dutch for the first time in my life and believed i had arrived and was home oh it's so brilliant yeah what about that philip that idea of dreaming and arriving home? These are really wistful, melancholy concepts, aren't they, that eddy through Sobald's work? We've entered a very Sebaldian period here because,

can you guess what I was going to read? There's a second one. Oh! Not your reading, but the reading afterwards. And I'll just lead up to that, if I may. Do it. Because what you say, Andy, is very true. And I think the whole notion of the book is this inexorable movement towards meaning to some kind of context for what we are being told.

this cabinet of curiosities, this wunderkammer of things that he brings together, gathered from his memory, his invention, from our collective history, from the past, from the future, from the present. And to me it's this inexorable movement towards the shore as you intimate in that reading. And this sense of this place, this land which is tipping into the ocean. I mean, actually Britain is physically tipping into the North Sea. You know, these coasts are the most rapidly eroding,

and it's almost as though the sea is going to disappear or the shore is going to disappear before he even gets there, in a way. And it's back to Europe, over Doggerland, over this flooded land, over Thomas Brown, his buried urns over edward fitzgerald and his tinted glasses and his black labrador there's always a dog somewhere in sebald's world very interesting that's we can talk about that in a minute because i think it's really interesting where that comes from but he ends up and if you don't mind me launching into a reading after that just because by Sebaldian coincidence I'm picking up where Jesse left off. That evening in Amsterdam I sat in the peace of the lounge of a private hotel

by the Vondelpark which I knew from earlier visits and made notes on the stations of my journey, now almost at an end. The days I had spent on various inquiries at Bad Kissingen, the panic attack in Baden, the boat excursion on Lake Zürich, my run of good luck at the casino in Lindau, my visits to the Alt-Pinacotech in Munich, and to the grave of my patron saint in Nuremberg, of whom legend has it that he was the son of a king from Dacia, or Denmark, who married a French princess in Paris. During the wedding night, the story goes, he was afflicted with a sense of profound unworthiness. Today, he is supposed to have said to his bride, our bodies are adorned, but tomorrow they will be food for worms.

Before the break of day, he fled, making pilgrimage to Italy, Before the break of day, he fled, making pilgrimage to Italy, where he lived in solitude till he felt the power to work miracles rising within him. After saving the Anglo-Saxon princes Winnibald and Wannibald from certain starvation with a loaf of bread baked from ashes and brought to them by a celestial messenger. And after preaching a celebrated sermon in Vincenza, he went over the Alps to Germany. At Regensburg, he crossed the Danube on his cloak and there made a broken glass hole again. And in the house of a wheelwright too mean to spare the kindling he lit a fire with icicles this story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has of late meant much to me and i wonder now whether in a coldness and desolation may not be the condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow. Be that as it may, my namesake is said to have performed many more miracles in his hermitage, in the imperial forests between the rivers

Regnitz and Pegnitz, and to have healed the sick before his corpse, as he held ordained, Now what follows in the book is an amazing description of this sarcophagus in St. Sabaoth's church in Nuremberg. So I went on my own pilgrimage there this year and I found this, which is the leaflet that you get to this extraordinary, and this is the same image of this extraordinary thing which looks like a sort of Gothic lorry. And actually the saint, Saint Sebald, is in this silver casket sitting on snails right sitting on snails the bottom but and and with dolphins and tritons and uh and and hercules

with an enormous erection but saint seabold is on wheels so he could be wheeled around the town for display. You're holding up the leaflet which says at the top, in 1980, block type, Das Grab des Heiligen Sebald von Nuremberg, which means? The grave of the Saint Sebald of Nuremberg. Marvellous. Thank you for bringing that up. I'm going to take a little picture of that and see if we can put that up on the website.

Extraordinary that you should both choose the same kind of, from the same bit. It's not extraordinary, John. No, of course it isn't. This book is like a brain, isn't it? It's the connections. I mean, we can talk about the influence of Sebald and there has been a huge influence that a couple of things watching Grant G's amazing film Patience after Sobald recently, Adam Phillips said something that I love,

which he said the book is irradiated with melancholy, which is a beautiful phrase for how it feels. John, you're talking about Grant G's film Patience, which I strongly recommend to listeners. It's a fantastic film. If you can track down a copy of the DVD, inside the insert on the DVD is Rick Moody, the novelist Rick Moody has created a flow chart

for everything that happens in The Rings of Saturn. And one of the things that's so great about it is you look at this map that he's made and you think but that's not my experience of reading the book at all and when you were both reading your sections there one of the things i found difficult about to say about which now i love of course is rather like the piece of music we heard at the top there is a almost um you can't discern how one part has been bolted onto another there is a drift of imagery and ideas which keeps going. It's not logical at all. It appears incredibly like it's a bloke wandering around thinking of things. The degree of structure. Just in the first chapter alone, you don't notice,

he starts with the idea that he's in a hospital room and there's only this one bit of light. The whole of the chapter is about burial. The two academics whose rooms are completely covered in paper. Then he moves to the anatomy lesson. And there's an amazing bit where he sees it's again, things, liminal kind of movements from shadow to light, shadow to light, all the way through the chapter. He alone sees that the greenish annihilated body, he alone sees the shadow and the half open mouth over the dead man's eyes. And this goes

right the way through. Brown says all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. And then, of course, Brown's breakbook, which is the urn burial, about discovering things that have been lost, memories, scraps of silk. This is not somebody having a breakdown, walking through the countryside, observing nature. This a a layered complex brilliant kind of multifaceted work of art also rather droll i mean i can very droll i can remember reading 20 years ago the scene in eating the dreadful fish and chips in the awful hotel and laughing out loud i actually nearly i nearly read that bit because I do think it's very funny and also heartbreaking, like utterly heartbreaking,

when at the end he kind of then looks out the window and there's just the sea which appears not to move. That's right. And that's it. You're like, well, this was funny and now I'm destroyed. I mean, there is that kind of slightly Germanic, I would say, almost Herzogian kind of melancholy, but there's so much going on in this book. Normally we would recap a bit of the biographical data on Max Sobel's life,

but we have a special guest to do it for us, who I think, are you there, Robert? Sobel, Winifred Georg Sobel, was born in Wertheim-Algai in the Bavarian Alps in 1944. He studied in Germany at Freiburg, and in 1967 he moved to England, first to Manchester and then to East Anglia, to Norwich, where he settled and lived out his working life

as a professor of European literatures and literature and translation at the University of East Anglia. And success came late to him. He wrote his books first in German and then carefully oversaw their translation into English. And it was when the books began to appear in English that his rise in the English-speaking literary world began. It's Robert McFarlane calling from a train there to give us that. That's an excerpt from Patience, the film we were talking about, which again, if you can find a copy, please have a look. Could we talk a bit about the formal, innovative nature of Sebald's work,

specifically the photographs? I think I'm right in saying that we're all very familiar now with photographs being dropped into the text of books. This is one of the first, I mean, if this was all Sebald had done, we'd still be thinking about him and talking about him. But the idea of dropping in photographs which either do or don't comment on what you're reading and may or may not relate to one another seems to me incredibly bold.

Sebald as not writer, but writer and artist simultaneously. There's Camerou Lucida, Roland Barthes, he talks about, and that's the book that I quite often think of in connection with this. It's also a book where it's very hard to classify. Is it philosophy or memoir? And he also kind of it's very ruminative. And he also has photographs, although he talks about them more directly. But he also uses photographs in the text.

And it's also I mean, it goes back to Walter Benjamin, I think, doesn't it? What Benjamin talks about images and the power of them. And what's really interesting, I think, is that actually what you say, Andy, and Jesse, is that actually that's why this book appeals to contemporary artists who work, so people like Tassida Dean, for instance. Max talked about echo space, which is the space where the words stop and the picture takes over so are you reading it like a caption are you reading is that part of this narrative becomes suddenly becomes visual

and also by an act of fraudulent showmanship as he said so many of them are fake so many of them are fake. So many of them are fake. He was, I mean, John, you know better than I, but he was a regular visitor to the copy shop in Norwich, wasn't he? He'd get a perfectly good photograph and then photocopy. This is my favourite because you'd get back from people, why are the photos so shit? Because Max wants them to be like that. They're so powerful that on that Sunday morning,

when I opened the Independent on Sunday, on page two, I saw a picture of Max and his death announced. I thought it was a subordian construct. I mean, just because the way he deals with biography and people, the way he, you know, like roger casement the way he talks about roger casement these are these are people who like shifting through time and space in his head and that sense of what's fictional and what's non-fictional about people's lives i know even when he's talking about the nurses in the first chapter in the hospital and he's talking about

katie and lizzie but he's very generous to them. He says, Katie or Lizzie was describing a holiday on Malta where she said the Maltese with a death defying insouciance, quite beyond comprehension drove neither on the left nor on the right, but always on the shady side of the road. Again, it's just even a little anecdote like that is stitched into it.

We've got a clip here. Now this is quite a long clip, but i wanted to include the whole thing because say about is speaking here without notes um he's asked about photography and then he develops his thoughts while he's talking and i thought it was really for anyone who's read say about you know the idea of great writers some great writers write as they talk when you hear them talk they have the cadences which you're familiar with well i think you may recognize this yes i'm not entirely sure that i'm able to make sense out out of you know whatever i come across at all, except in the effort of recording it.

So whatever sense there is, is primarily an aesthetic sense. And I realize, you know, that making in prose a decent pattern out of what happens to come your way is a preoccupation which, in a sense, has no higher ambitions, really, than for a brief moment in time to rescue something out of that stream of history that keeps rushing past. This is why I have, among other reasons, why I have photographs in the text, because the photograph is perhaps the paradigm of it. The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in a box in an attic.

It's a nomadic thing that has a small chance only to survive. And I think we all know that feeling, you know, when we come accidentally across a photographic document being of one of our lost relatives, being of a totally unknown person, and we get the sense of appeal. They're stepping out, having been found by somebody. They're stepping out, having been found by somebody. After decades or half centuries having been found by somebody, all of a sudden they come stepping back over the threshold and they say, we were here two months and please take care of us for a while.

We're all sitting silent because I've got goosebumps. I don't know about you. I find that incredibly interesting moving you know uh significant listening to that the idea of rescue and of photographs and the the that these things living having a separate life look after us for a while that's the thing that's the say bal it the idea that the thing will shift and go and i mean he's so he again precision is the thing philip i happen to know that your book spike island was read by max wasn't it yeah it must have been you andy did i ask you to send it to him or did someone sent him it was you yeah and then this letter arrives in the post, my suburban house in Southampton.

And I'll pull it out and there's a postcard of painting. I vaguely recognise it. It's Poussin's Mirage. And I'm not going to read it because it's embarrassing. You were thrilled. Yeah. I was thrilled. Yeah.

So I got a series of postcards. This is even more embarrassing. I'm not going to read it. Do you want me to read it? No. As your former editor? No, I don't. I'm going to give you a copy of it, though, Andy.

Yeah, okay. His handwriting, as you can see, it's sort of almost sort of almost renaissance, this script. I know that this is a German school thing. A friend of mine who is his contemporary. It's like French handwriting, isn't it? They had this very, it's so interesting, yeah. But doesn't it speak to him? And it's like, you know, all good wishes ever yours, Max.

This is a man I never met. And that was dated 9th of September, 2001. 2001. Jessie, can I ask you, do we think of Sebald as a writer in translation when we read him? I mean, I don't. And I keep having to sort of remind myself as I'm reading that it is, but then I... It almost feels like that's sort of a part of it,

that this idea that it's a text which is kind of interpreted or that the words are not necessarily... They're not the words that he kind of wrote or spoke. Almost feels like that's a part of the book, this idea of kind of tracing things backwards, tracing them through. And sometimes, my German is terrible, sometimes I've thought I could learn it just to read this. And then I've thought, well, I'm not sure that tracing it back

in that way is sort of necessary. I feel like the prose exists almost in a European interzone. It isn't quite good English while at the same time being wonderful English. Yeah. It has a precision which we as English writers would not be so punctilious about, I think. I think. But then it's so hard, isn't it, to define what it is that makes a voice a voice, Philip? When I did actually see him and read, he refused to read in English.

He let Anthea Bell read in English for him. His translator, first. His translator. I mean, he was very, very particular, obviously, in the translation. His English was perfectly good enough for him to have written it. It's almost like he wanted the act of translation, that the act of translation, it's a very Sobaldian thing. But on the whole, I think it is possible to translate books at a level

which makes them as valuable for the foreign reader as for the reader of the original language. Translators have to be extremely accomplished, and there are such people, fortunately, who are able to do this. Why don't I translate my own books? Well, the main reason is that I started writing very late in my mid-forties, and I haven't got the time, because I can already see the horizon looming. And so, you know, and I have another full-time job to attend to. And so becoming a translator as well as a writer, I think, would overtax probably my nervous system. So I thought I better not do it,

and quite apart from the fact that I don't entirely trust my English. I mean, I can. There is a great difference. If you get a poor draft of a text and if you are reasonably competent in the second language, then you can perhaps improve on that draft. But that is not the same as doing the draft yourself in the first place. And so there are, you know, sometimes two incompetent people can make a competent pair. I'd just like to point out in a rather sad but very Sebaldian moment that that was recorded two months before Sebald's death in New York

in September 2001. Yeah. I mean. Which is, that's around the time that I heard him speak. What's really interesting is that the distance is physical and he is a German in exile. He is like Thomas Mann. And when Thomas Mann left Europe in 1939, sailed from Southampton where I live,

he announced that German culture is moving to America for the duration. And I've just read Dr. Faustus, Mann's book, Dr. Faustus, which is mentioned in The Natural History of Destruction. Because Mann is writing from one remove, looking at a Germany which he's not experiencing, where he experienced the rise of that regime, but he is writing from the Pacific Palisades on Venice Beach, looking through palm trees to Muscle Beach where these Tadzios that he's lusted after. This sense of looking back through the past as it's happening at this devastated land, the thing that is never written about.

That's the thing that's never really written about in The Rings of Saturn. It is and it isn't. It's that sense of there's always some absence to be filled in his creative language but isn't that because of that distance it's the physical distance of his removal from something he can't come to terms with because he's the son of a you know of a german wehrmacht officer and because he can't come to terms with what the Germans did to other people and that's true in Dr Faustus in Mann's writing he can't come to terms because he his own people haven't been able to come to terms with what was done to them in turn there seems to me I

don't know how you feel about this but in the in the light of exactly that particularly in the light of exactly that, particularly in The Emigrants, he writes about a series of people who kill themselves, not in a grand gesture, but in a way because the process that you've described can be lived with for so long and no longer. And certainly that opening chapter of The Emigrants, which is probably only 20 pages long, anyone who's read that will 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. to inhabit other voices and other consciousness through this book is one of the things. But you feel that when he says that, you know, about the dog star and summer, that the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the dog star. At all events, in retrospect, I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom, but also with the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the

traces of destruction reaching far back into the past that were evident even in that remote place. You feel he's succumbing to some of the same kind of melancholy inward looking destructive uh stuff that is that has led to the deaths of the people in the immigrants it's and his journey his pilgrimage which is you know a word that he used about what the book was a religious journey for him and it concerned with death concerned with in the end, the passage, the amazing final paragraph of the book with the silk on the things and the leaving. It's amazing. Except that that, in the timescale of the book,

that section in the hospital happens after. After the book. Although the book takes you on that journey, there's always this sense that his, or the journey of the narrator, is towards this hospital and isn't mentioned again but kind of looms in your sort of mind as a reader. Yes, he's already put the not so happy ending right at the front of the book. Well, also the beginning of The Rings of Saturn.

Funnily enough, you finished a book on the way here. Yay! It's Sabaldian because The Rings of Saturn starts with him saying, I had just finished a piece of work. He's at liberty. He's striding out on this walk. Only you're never at liberty. You're set free to find something else to enclose you.

I actually did get to meet him that final time. I actually did get to beat him that final time. Amazing. And he was just that walrus moustache, you know, nicotine stained. He was going out for a quick fag outside, you know, outside the Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, wasn't it and uh and um and uh and i said i introduced myself he was with boyd tonkin who's then the editor the um great supporter of sobo's work of the uh of the independent and um and i said you know i was introduced myself and he was very sweet and he

said um he says it's very good book you wrote. I hope you don't mind if I steal bits. I'll never find out what you might have stolen. I do love that, you know, the piece of the pseudodoxica epidemica that I can't now find the reference to. It's almost at the end of the book. Isn't that brilliant? I thought that was, I can remember noticing that before but that having reread it i thought that was absolutely extraordinary and so clever and obviously kind of purposeful and exactly the way that everything in

this book is kind of purposeful but but seems entirely natural because obviously he could have you know and isn't that the strange thing there There's a rather marvellous bit in the film where Ian Sinclair says the lanes of England are thick with psychogeographers as a result of Sebald, which is sort of true. I said to you, John, the other day, I feel Sebald was claimed by psychogeography and has been claimed by nature writing and is neither is neither he is he is inimitable he is insofar as the word means anything he is a historian i mean i think he is

somebody who is writing the kind of history you said this right at the beginning jesse that that the future that we we can't write impartial kind of objective history. It just doesn't work in a, I mean, you also said, Philip, which I love with the prelapsarian, you know, the pre-internet, it's a pre-internet book. Before I ask final question before we wind up, I'd just like to say to listeners, if you are a fan of say about or a fan of the rings of Saturn in addition to grant G's film patients where we can also recommend we can also recommend the podcast curiously specific which is

co-hosted by our former guest Lloyd Shepherd yeah very much where they've attempted to visit various locations of course like everyone does, he tries to walk parts of the Rings of Saturn before discovering they're not where they ought to be. But that's a very interesting podcast. Another thing I'm always trying to crowbar into Backlist is I failed this time to get a clip in, but I would strongly recommend, if you like Say About,

and especially if you like Sebald and especially if you like the Rings of Saturn, Patrick Keeler's films London Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins Robinson in Space in particular which I think is 97 so there was clearly something in the air

the idea of a unfollowable historo-geography, soulful state of the nation travelogue, but in film rather than in book form, I cannot recommend that highly enough. That is a core text. So we've talked a lot about Say about work taken as a whole and it is very rich and clearly if you read one book and it will lead to another book he has themes that he comes and goes from we've discussed some of those what is it about the rings of saturn that is unique if it is unique what is

the thing about this particular book that speaks to people? I mean, I think it is honestly the closest book that I've ever counted to a perfect book. Like it feels as though it is so complicated. There are so many things in it, but it is a single whole entity. It's like one of those very, very complicated cabinets that are so beautifully made that you can't see the joins. And it's absolutely extraordinary, I think. you can't see the joins and it's absolutely extraordinary I think it's that sense that this is one entire thought yes that is being given to you and it is a gift and you can spend your life on it and you should read it multiple times and some of those times you should read it carefully and some of them you should just let it kind of woozily sort of sweep over you. Think, hang on, we were reading about paintings

and now we're reading about silk and I don't know how that happened, but that's fine, that's okay. Philip, what do you think? Which is why it's good to read it with opium running through your veins because it is one long dream, as Jesse so beautifully puts it. And, you know, he talked about his work as being analogous to taking his dog for a walk at a black Labrador and letting it off its leash in a field.

And the dog sniffs in one corner and sniffs in another corner and comes back with this kind of composite image of the field, a sort of nothingness. The book is about, when you've tried to describe the book, we sort of nothingness. The book is about nothing. When you've tried to describe the book, we've spent nearly an hour talking about this, but we still haven't got anywhere near. I know. Anywhere near the beauty, the transcendence, the funniness,

the sexuality, the eroticism, the depth, the shallowness. You know, when I feel so pleased when I say to someone, have you read The Rings of Saturn? It's like I'm giving you an orgasm. John, I seem to remember that was your sales pitch when you published it, wasn't it? pitch when you published it wasn't it you know i you you touch on something what i feel about this book is that there is no country there is no such thing as england there is no such thing as great britain that it's the most european book but it's not even the europe it's the world there isn't a book i know that is as rich and yet you go into it and the stuff that you've forgotten and yet none of it none of it's heavy it is a miraculous book it's it's like a TARDIS when you're inside it it seems like it contains everything and then you kind of come out of it again you realize it's it's 10 sections and

he does that brilliant thing of of describing them and with the beginning of the book so it sounds like oh yeah that's kind of yeah I can see the shape or what but it is a maze you know he gets lost in this book and you get you get lost in it every time you go the maze the cross section of which he compares to his own brain right it is a book about the world but it's also it feels like it's a book about yourself oneself everyone self. It's like someone saying, it's okay. It is a sad thing to be a person, and that is all right for all of us. And I mean, every time. And that childish sense of curiosity as well, that everything is still there to be discovered. It's all there, the potentiality.

About two months ago in a junk shop in Bangay, which is the nearest small town to where I live, I fished out of a box of cheap prints a little card which had a lichen on it, a dried lichen, and underneath it said in very neat handwriting, gathered from the tomb of Marshal Ney, Paris, 7th of July, 1833. And something like this, totally, you know, valueless as such, somehow gets me going.

Hearing Max's voice is actually very moving. But unfortunately we're going to have to, our meanderings now must cease. Thank you to Jesse and to Philip for guiding us through the maze, and to Alana Chance for conducting us so surely and to Unbound for giving us the key to the door. You can download over 100 episodes of Backlisted plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm you can contact us on twitter via facebook or boundless and uh i would like to plug our two forthcoming gigs on wednesday november the 13th we are at bookseller crow in south london we don't know yet with whom with whom

or on what because bookseller crow is a fantastic bookshop which has been supportive to me and john and lots of writers that we know so that's a benefit uh podcast for them so please come along to that we do actually have some ideas we're just we're just fixing them now we're not being coy and the other thing is our christmas get together stroke agm is at the london library on the evening of wednesday december the 11th where we will be discussing a la recherche de ton perdu by proust in French, John. So I hope you're good to go. Shush. We'll be back in a fortnight.

Thank you for listening. And if you are still listening to this part of the podcast, I have borrowed something from the very popular Marvel films. So keep listening. I was always, as it were, tempted to declare openly from quite early on my great debt of gratitude to

Thomas Bernhard. But I was also conscious of the fact that on my great debt of gratitude to Thomas Bernhardt. But I was also conscious of the fact that one oughtn't to do that too openly because then immediately one gets put in a drawer which says Thomas Bernhardt, a follower of Thomas Bernhardt, etc. And these labels never go away. Once one has them, they stay with one. So Bernhardt single-handedly, I think, invented a new form of narrating, which appealed to me from the start. Bernhardt's mode of telling a tale is related to all manner of things. I mean,

not least the theatrical monologue. In the early book that bears the English title Gargoyles and in German is called Die Verstörung, the whole of the second part of that is the monologue of the Prince of Saurau and it would make a wonderful piece on the stage. So it has the intensity of the presence, the presence that one can experience in the theatre, and he brings that to fiction.

If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.