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

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

In 2019 we made this show on W.G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn, which was first published in Germany in 1995. 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. * 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 and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus episodes and original writing, become a patron at ⁠www.patreon.com/backlisted⁠ + there's a free trial week. *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The new 2027 Subaru Cross-Trek hybrid. Consumer Reports top-rated subcompact SUV. Stop by your local Subaru dealership or visit Subaru.ca to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Hello, it's Nikki. Hi, it's Andy. And here we are. Welcome to another extract from the archive of Backlisted.

What year was this recorded, Nikki? I can't remember. 2019, November 2019. November 2019. We recorded this one in person. I remember that, except we were a person down. Yes. You weren't there, were you Nick?

I wasn't there. I was probably, you know, going off celebrating my 21st birthday. Yes, I remember. I remember. I remember that now. Yes, weren't you in ClubMed? It was on an 1830s package holiday. Yeah, I think you were.

I think you were. Well, while you were away, we decided we'd take the opportunity to crank things up a bit and talk about the Rings of Saturn by WG Seibalt. And to that end, we asked the novelist Jesse Greengrass and the writer Philip Haw to join us. And you can listen to this episode now yourselves. I would just like to say a couple of things. things that I remember from this recording, which was a pretty remarkable one. I seem to remember

at the beginning I read a poem from Vertigo and Ghost by Fiona Benson, Fiona Benson, who was to become one of my favourite contemporary poets. And I remember that landing in the room really heavily and well. So I remember that. I remember thinking what a privilege it was to talk about Sebel, with not just with Jesse and Philip, but also with the gentleman who was responsible for publishing the book in Britain in the first place, which is my colleague, our colleague, John Mitchinson. He was the publisher of the emigrants and the Rings of Saturn,

and it's largely down to his work and the work of his colleagues at Harville at the time, and of course WG say about himself, that those books created the impact that they did on publication and which continues to echo through to the present day. So there was a real sense of occasion about this recording. Also, afterwards, Philip, who I used to work with a long time ago, said to me, and this is the first time anybody ever said this about that listed,

he said to me, I said, thanks Philip for coming on doing this. And he said, it's really important. and I sort of laughed and self-deprecated. Well, the book's really important or our podcast? No, batlisted. Oh, wow. Well, I'm just quoting him. He said, but what you're doing here is really important.

And at the time I thought, is it? I don't know. I'm not sure it is. These days, I tend to think actually it is, yes. So I'm accepting that compliment and humbly passing it on. And speaking of doing important work and books, you know, formally public. by John Mitchinson. There is a third thing I would like to say before we listen to the episode, which is many of you listening to this will have read a book that was published 40 years ago

called The Grass Arena by John Healy, an extraordinary memoir of Low Life, John Healy, the Irish writer. And famously, the book was a critical success and a disaster in terms of John Healy's relationship with his publisher and by extension the book industry. And only 40 years later has the sequel appeared. It's called the Grass Crown. It's perhaps not attracting as many reviews as it ought to. Perhaps that his reputation is a lingering one. But it is an extraordinary and important book. It's called The Grass Crown. And once again, it wouldn't be in the world if it weren't for the efforts of our colleague John Mitchinson. Is that really?

Yes, John is responsible for making John Healy feel secure enough and safe enough and supported enough to venture once more into the world of British publishing. So I want to draw your attention to that book specifically because it's wonderful and it's in bookshops now and it's called The Grass Crown by John Healy. I think that guy I've monologue there sorry Nick tell me

okay so this is a little bit where we plug our subscriber benefits if you follow us on patreon.com forward slash backlisted you can get some brand new shows that we continue to do

while we're on sabbatical from this the main show so there's a couple of things some great shows in fact we've recorded we're working our way through a randomly drawn out of a hat booker prize of winning books. And the last book that we did was Amsterdam by Ian McEwen. And if you go on to

Patreon right now, you can have a listen to that. Or you can follow along with our next book that we've picked out of the hat, which is very more recent. It's Shuggy Bain by Douglas Stewart. Winner of the Book of Prize for Fiction in 2020. Yeah. And shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. Not only that, Nick, I seem to remember we've got a little gimmick which we can also share with listeners about the next episode of Posh Bingo, haven't we?

Yeah, so our Booker Prize winning show is called Posh Bingo. And this month, we're reading Shuggy Bain. We're also going to be doing the live show which you can go to on our Patreon site at 9.30 at night. So while we're talking about Shuggy Bain, we'll also be finding out who wins the 2026 Booker Prize winner. It might even be Douglas Stewart with John of Jen.

Yes. So that's Monday the 9th of November on our Patreon at 9.30pm. If you want to be amongst friends as the announcement of this year's Booker Prize winner drops, talking about an old Booker Prize winner, which may be the same Booker Prize winner, you know where to come. www. www. patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Yeah.

And if you're really clever, you can get a week subscription for free. So if you time it well, you don't have to pay for that. Great. Anything else? No, that's plenty. Oh, that's enough, isn't it? Right. Right, everybody.

We hope you enjoy this discussion of WG's Saybouts The Rings of Saturn from 2019. Please listen to the malefluous voices of Philip Haw, Jesse Greengrass and others. And we'll see you in a fortnight. 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 marum grass rustling in the wind like silk, a sense of uneasiness pervading everything.

I'm John Mitchinson. And I'm Andy Miller, 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. But 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 Haw. 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 the 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 Nonfiction and his most recent book, rises. A masterpiece, if I may say so, Philip. One of my favourite books.

Ever. Thank you very much. I can go now, can't I? That's it. We're done. That's what they came from. 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 Moby Dickbigreed.com. He also goes swimming every morning at what time? Three o'clock. Depends where the tide is. And what do you have as a reward for your swim? You were telling me, oh, five, ginsicits. That's amazing.

And it all before 5 a.m. A long time before 5 a. And how long have you done that routine? That's been, it's only being 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 Hagerston, Baths. So I'm making up for lost time. Amazing.

Also joining us today is all the way from Berwick on Twitter. The writer Jesse Greengrass. Hello, Jesse. Hello. Jesse 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 Mourn award, and was enthusiastically praised by McColley, John Mitchinson, in the episode of Battlisted devoted to Against Nature by Huisman, so you can go back and check our bona fides on that. and her novel site was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for the women's prize and the James Tate 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? 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 trip? Exciting news today, Jesse. Oh, I finished my book. Hooray! Your next book. You heard it here first, everyone. The new Jesse 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. 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 WG Seibault, better known as Max, to people who knew him.

first published in German by Eichborn-Velag 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. did. It is Les Ané, the Years by Annie Eno, a French writer with a fantastically prize-winning reputation. In this book, I think she won the Pre Renaudelaide in France and the Premier Stregor in Italy. And in 2017, she was awarded the Marguerite Yosina Prize for a 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 Eurnaud 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, George Perret, you know, the Jemussevien, 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 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 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. It's a really, really, really profound book. And how long is it? Exquisitely translated. It's really, I'll tell you how long it is. It's 225 of your English pages.

It's exquisitely translated. 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 Ose Ortega Igasset, but all we have is our history and it does not belong to us. All the twilight images, a lot of the book is photograph, 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 Lour 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's what we do. God, that's good.

It's published by Fitzcarral, isn't it? It's published brilliantly in the, Fitzgeraldo as a memoir, but it is interesting and as 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 my eyes 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 could 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 re-channels the Greek myths of Zeus as a transformative power into Zeus, as it says here on the jacket flap, serial rapist for whom women are prey and sex is weaponized. It is extremely distressing, 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. 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 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. 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. 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 Sebel's 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 much. very good friend of mine and I think that at the same time they both suggested that I read it and it was very peculiar my grandparents have always lived on the Suffolk Coast so in 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 and he left school very young and was 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. 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 Dunedge. 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. like this book was kind of written, not to sound terrible, but it did feel like it was kind of written for me specifically. And reading it again, I wonder 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, this is specific, this is for me. People's response to say about, 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 Sebelt?

Well, I was given the book, I realized I looked in 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, it's 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 my birthday, 2000. So I knew I had to date 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 if I was conscious, but it changed me as a writer. And I mean, it changed the way I'm 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. Melville started writing this grand adventure of the South Sea fisheries, the whale fisheries and thought he's 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 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. And I remembered, and I was obviously thinking about Max, because I said, have you ever seen Rembrandt's Dr. Toults's anatomy a lesson? And we don't usually discuss culture in here. And I have this vision of myself, you know, like being described by Max lying on this table and unearthrised 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 are like friends. They betray you after a while. And I wondered whether this book had betrayed me. But it hadn't.

Can I just flash? The listeners, that I think is my favourite thing any guest has ever said on an episode of this podcast today. So already we're operating at 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 Sobilt. So I'll vouch for your memory there.

I'm 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 Saybalt? I should say I was one of the team at Harville. Bill Swainson was the commissioning editor. I first discovered Zabel, 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 by the time I'd get 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. And 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 the, of Saturn, the emigrants and Vertigo are all novels, although are they novels? But here's Max Seabaut 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's all, 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 Huzum. 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 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? No, but I do remember thinking, thinking, oh, God, 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, 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 had, if only that bravely 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, you know, 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 novel. 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 this is a bit in which he remembers being in Southwold looking at the sea, 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 of 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. Didero, 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. In that curious country, he wrote, the most modest rise gave one the loftiest sensation, and for Didero 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 Sheveningen, a promenade without equal. It was not easy to appreciate these observations as I walked along Parkstrapped towards Sheveningen. 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 Sheveningen 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's Eddie through Sobilt's work. We've entered a very Sybolian period here because can you guess what I was going to read? Oh! Not your reading, but the reading afterwards. And I 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 vundercama 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 coast is 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 doggar land, 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 Sybald's world.

Very interesting. 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 piece of the lounge of a private hotel by the Vondal Park, 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 Barden, the boat excursion on Lake Zurich, my run of good luck at the casino in Lindau,

and my visits to the Alt-Pinnocotech 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, where he lived in solitude till he felt the power to work miracles rising within him. After saving the Anglo-Saxon princes Winnebold and Wanibald 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 Medanube on his cloak and there made a broken glass whole 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, was born on a cart drawn by two oxen to the place where his grave is to this day. Now, what follows in the book is an amazing description, this sarcophagus in St. Sabal's church in Nuremberg. So I went on my own pilgrimage there this year, and I found this, which is the leaflets 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, St. Sebald is in there. It's in this silver casket.

Sitting on snails, right? Sitting on snails at the bottom. And with dolphins and tritons and Hercules with an enormous erection. But St. Seabold is on wheels so he could be wheeled round the town for... for display.

You're holding up the leaflet, which says at the top in 1980 block type, That scrap des Hegelgen Zebald-Zeybilt-Nunberg, which means...

The grave of the Saint Sebald of Nuremberg. That's marvellous. Thank you for agreeing that. I'm going to take a little picture of that to 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.

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So instead of hearing this lovely track, you'll hear this in seconds. Hello, intact insurance. This book is like a brain, isn't it? It's the connections. I mean, we can talk about the influence of Sobald, and there has been a huge influence, that a couple of things watching Grant G's amazing film patients after Sobalt 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 flowchart 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 Eno's music we heard at the top. There is a almost, 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, right? It appears incredibly like it's some bloke wandering around, thinking of things. The degree of structure. Just in the first chapter alone, you know, you don't notice. He starts with the idea that he's in a hospital room and that there's only 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 locked, memories, scraps of silk. This is not somebody has. having a breakdown, walking through the countryside, observing nature. This is a layered, complex, brilliant, kind of multifaceted work of art. Also, rather droll. I mean, I can remember reading 20 years ago the scene eating the dreadful fish and chips in the awful hotel and laughing out loud, right? I actually nearly read that bit because I do think it's very funny. And it was so 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. 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 was saying, almost hoaggy and 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 Sebel's life. But we have a special guest to do it for us, who I think, are you there, Robert? Zebelt, Vinifred Georg Zebelt, was born in Vertechemalgai 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. Sir 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 Seibel'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, say about 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, Sabal as not writer, but writer and artists simultaneously. There's Camer Lucida Roland Bart. He talks about, and that's the book that I quite often think of in connection with this. He also, it's also a sort of what, 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 all to Benjamin, I think, doesn't it? And what Benjamin talks about images and the power of them. And what's really interesting, I think is that actually what you say, Andy's really true and Jesse, is that actually

that's why this book appeals to contemporary artists who works with people like Tasseter 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 as that part of this narrative suddenly becomes visual? And also, by an act of fraudulent showmanship, as he said. So made them a fake. So many of them are fake. He was, I mean, John, you were no 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, the photocopy, right? 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, and page two, I saw a picture of Max and his death announced. I thought it was a subordinate 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 people who are shifting through time and space in his head. and that sense of what's fictional and what's non-fiction 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. 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 Sabat is speaking here without notes. 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 Saybout, 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. Yes, I'm not entirely sure that I'm able to make sense 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, and then 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, an attic is a nomadic thing that, you know, 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. 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 also sitting silent because I've got goosebumps. I don't know about you. I find that incredibly interesting, moving, you know, significant. Listening to that, the idea of rescue and of photographs and that these things living, having a separate life. Look after us for a while. That's the thing. That's the Seabaldian moment, isn't it, the idea that the thing will shift and go.

I mean, he's so, again, precision is the thing. Philip, I happen to know that your books, 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? Someone sent him. It was you, wasn't it? And then this letter arrives in the post, my suburban house in South Hampton. And I'll pull it out, and there's a postcard of painting.

I vaguely recognise it. It's Poussand'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 like it's 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? 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.

Jesse, can I ask you? Do we think of Seabelt 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 cut 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 that 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. 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, for us. 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. It's a very Zabaldian 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-40s, 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, you know, if you get to. 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 Seibelian moment that that

was recorded two months before Seabalt's death in New York in September 2001. Yeah. I mean... Which is that 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

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 man is writing from one remove, looking at a Germany which he's not experiencing, where he experienced the rise at that regime, but he is writing from the Pacific Palisades on Venice Beach, looking through palm trees to Mussel Beach where these Tadzios,

that he's lusted after his life, 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 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 man's writing, but he can't come to terms because 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 light of exactly that, particularly in the emigrants, he writes about a series of people

who killed 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 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 other consciousness through this book is one of the things. But you feel that when he says about the Dog Star and Summer

that the old superstition that certain ailments as 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 stuff that has led to the deaths of the people and the immigrants. And his journey, his pilgrimage, which is a word that he used about what the book was, a religious journey for him, and 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 time scale 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. Yeah. And isn't mentioned again, but kind of looms in your... that of mind is 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. Funny enough, you finished a book on the way here. Saybaldian, 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. And you're never at liberty. You're set free to find something else to enclose you.

I actually did get to beat him. that final time. And he was just, just that walrus mustache, 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 I sort of, I introduced myself. He was with Boyd Tonkin, who's then the director, the great supporter of Sobol's work. of the independent.

And I said, you know, I was introduced myself and he was very sweet and he said, he says, that's a very good book you wrote there. I hope you don't mind if I steal bits. Yeah. I'll never find out what you might have stolen. Yeah.

I do love that, you know, the piece of these pseudoxica epidermica that I can't now find the reference to is almost at the end of the way. Isn't that brilliant? I thought that was, I can remember noticing that before, but 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 seems entirely natural, because obviously he could have, you know, about... And isn't that the strange thing? 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 Sabal, which is sort of true. I said to you, John, the other day, I feel Saybac was claimed by psychogeography

and has been claimed by nature writing and is neither. 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 the few. that we can't write impartial kind of objective history. It just, it doesn't work in a, in a, 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 Saybout or a fan of the Rings of Saturn, in addition to Grant G's film Patience, where we can also recommend the podcast Curiously Specific, which is co-hosted by our former guest Lloyd Shepard. Yeah, very much.

Where they've attempted to visit various locations, of course, like everyone does, who 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 backlisted. I failed this time to get a clip in. but I would strongly recommend if you like Sabalt,

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, historic 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, 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. It's that sense that this is one entire thought 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

and 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, the sort of nothingness. The book is about, 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, the, you know, when I feel so pleased when I say to someone, have you read The Rings of Saturn, it's like, I'm going to, giving you an orgasm. John, I seem to remember that with your sales pitch when you published it, wasn't it?

You know, 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 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 10 sections. And he does that brilliant thing of describing them

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 maid. You know, he gets lost in this book. And 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, one's self, every one's self. It's like someone saying, it's okay. Like, 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,

you know, that everything is still there to be discovered. that's it's all there the potentiality about two months ago in a junk shop in bangi 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 nay paris 7th of july 8th 1333. 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, a meandering now must cease. Thank you to Jesse and to Philip for guiding us through the maze. You can download over 100 episodes of Backlisted, Plus Follow links.

clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. 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 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 Bernhard, etc. And these labels never go away out. 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. Bernard'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 The Verstirung. 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, presence that one can experience in the theater, and he brings that to fiction. Unlock unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same low No Frills prices delivered.

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