BOOKS
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and mental, impeding further movement. The word "vertigo," with its
allusions to a known or unknown illness, also suggests a pervading
sense of an ever-encroaching madness. "While it might have been rare
for a man to be driven insane, little was required to tip the balance,"
Sebald writes. In the ramblings of all three books, he follows the story
of someone gone mad, though it's usually the gentle madness that comes
from retreating into one's own mind.
Sebald is greatly empathic towards those whose lives he trails, and
seems to have a particular compassion for those not quite made for life.
He himself has a delicate constitution: he suffers from headaches, is eas–
ily unsettled, and is at once fascinated and repelled by people, most
often strangers with whom he has awkward interactions that usually
leave him feeling apprehensive if not gripped by terror. When a waitress
brushes his shoulder he recalls "how few and far between" are the
moments in his life that he has been touched thus by a woman with
whom he was barely acquainted, remarking that "about such unwonted
gestures there had always been something disembodied and ghoulish,
something that went right through me!" In
The Rings of Saturn,
while
observing the nesting holes of some sand martins, he accidentally spies
a couple having sex on the beach and they seem to him "a many-limbed,
two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of
a prodigious species." To enter into one of Sebald's books is to experi–
ence the almost impossibly peculiar, quite vertiginous, sense of inhabit–
ing another's extreme solitude.
Space, always folding back over itself in these travels, is further dis–
torted by these alienating chasms that open between Sebald and those
he encounters. Space both fascinates and terrorizes him, at once beck–
oning to him and disturbing him. "In August
1992,"
he writes, "when
the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the country of
Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me
whenever I have completed a long stint of work." But he becomes pre–
occupied with both an "unaccustomed sense of freedom" and a "para–
lyzing horror" and ends up, a year to the day that he started the tour, in
a hospital in Norwich "in a state of almost total immobility." In
Sebald's world, the side effects of motion, of traveling through space
and time, are not to be taken lightly. Perhaps the most haunting image
in
The Emigrants-the
closest to perfect of the three books, which
traces the stories of four twentieth-century Germans of Jewish descent
who left their country-is the suicide of Paul Bereyter on the railway
tracks. "Railways had always meant a great deal to him," explains the
woman with whom Bereyter fell in love at the end of his life, "perhaps
