This is a strange book, at one and the same time quite confusing, and yet I could not leave it aside for long, I wanted to turn to the next page.
During 1992 the author, a German born Professor of German literature at Manchester, took a long walk along the Suffolk coast. This, thought I, would be a typical book of the genre, but I was, like Boris Johnson always is, mistaken. Indeed, he does walk from Somerleyton to Ditchingham, passing through Dunwich and Southwold, as you must if you walk this coast. But it is not so much the area that he discusses, instead he takes us all over the world, I almost wrote 'all over the place.'
The author begins by lying in a hospital for some reason unknown, not quite sure where he was and suffering the effects of the painkillers. He spends far too much time on a literary woman who spends her time living her life through the writer Gustave Flaubert, before he fastens on a book by Thomas Browne. Thomas Browne, 1605-1682, was a polymath, a title I once believed referred to a man who counted parrots. Instead it appears Browne wrote on many scientific, health and natural world subjects, and was well known in his day. Sebald becomes fascinated with him and spends many pages discussing his life and work. I was not so interested in this chapter.
Referring to fishermen noted on the coast, or the ones we used to have, the author launches into a history of the Herring, and quite interesting this is. Sebald describes the dereliction that is Lowestoft and the reasons why, as he passes through.
He continues this way throughout the book, describing people or places, those he knew or the subject of the moment, sometimes intriguing, sometimes boring as you will.
This was made irritating by a man who was a professor of literature who could not make paragraphs. Each page of the book is dense with words. Not a break between subjects, no paragraphs, just one story merging into the next on the same line. He may have thought this trendy but I think it makes following the subject difficult. Maybe I am just used to books that are paid out properly but his paragraphs, when you find one, are pages apart.
Nonetheless, I finished the book, learned once again about Dulwich, trees falling in the hurricane, Empress Tzu-hsi, who murdered her way to power, Joseph Conrad and the Belgian Congo, and the troubles in Ireland after the Second World War. Most of which we knew already.
Apart from the tales the author speaks of the thoughts in his mind. He describes his dreams in overlong passages, speaks of his thoughts of things brought to mind by small coincidences, and in general made me wonder if the hospital had given him too many of the wrong type of tablets.
However, that said I had to finish the book, skipping through the last chapter on Thomas Browne, and if this not yet been read it may be worth a look for many people. I do not think however, I will rush to buy any other of his works for the moment.
