Just when I didn't expect a frisson of literary awareness,, there it was. Mr Will Self reads voraciously, and one of the authors was WG Sebald.
No, I'd not heard of him either. But, as most of us do, Mr Self mixed up bits of various of Sebald's books, and had a muddled understanding of what Sebald was saying. Apparently. This is the lead article in the London Guardian's Review section today, easily found at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/07/wg-sebald-austerlitz-will-self-fiction
Lovely.
Will Self walks us through several of Sebald's plots, especially the walking for 25 miles of Suffolk coastline. And Mr Self was to try this himself, just to check whether the same thoughts and events happened to him. because Self knew that coastline very well. I was struck by his comparison of reading to film-watching, comparing a literary moment to that Jaws moment when the film zooms up on the shark in the surf, whilst simultaneously tracking the lens wider to reveal the landscape.
Hitchcock did the same trick in Vertigo. Apparently.
Reading this review has reminded me of the higher bits of life's experience, the abstract thought process. This was entirely lacking in my week. Instead we had the deluge of snow all over the country, followed by the failed public transport and the cancelled work. At no point during this week did anyone mention a single solitary abstract thought. So, here you are.
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