On a German fiction writer from part of an article in The Irish Times recently:
“WG Sebald would surely have hated being likened to Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding, but hear me out. Hornby and Fielding are talented writers who, through a combination of timing, judgment and luck, popularised new genres: ladlit and chicklit respectively. With Sebald, whom Carole Angier in the first major biography calls “the most revered 20th-century German writer in the world”, the genre was the genre-defying prose work, that combination of essay, memoir, history, literature – and photographs – that is now de rigueur in non-fiction. The genre-slippage is summed up in the three editions of his book The Rings of Saturn I own, which are categorised on the back first as Fiction/Travel/History, then Memoir/Travel/History, and most recently Fiction/Memoir/Travel. Nobody knows anything.
Let’s settle on “essayistic semi-fiction”, as Sebald’s friend and fellow writer Michael Hamburger put it. And it’s just how semi- the fiction is that Angier spends a good deal of her book trying to work out. After all, the chances of this being a full-blooded biography, based on the testimony of the people who knew him best, are slim, as we find out in the preface when she notes that Sebald’s widow, his closest friend and his last UK publisher all refused to speak to her. The subtitle of the book is telling: it echoes Ian Hamilton’s In Search of JD Salinger, a book about the failure to write a biography of a famously private author. “I knew Sebald wouldn’t want me,” Angier writes. The question is, do we?”
The reference to Salinger is telling. I think many fiction writers use the raw material of their personal life and make minor imaginative adjustments to avoid embarrassment. It appears to be what Salinger did, but he was very good at it, in my opinion. I am considering to do it myself soon. What is the point of fiction, if it has no correspondence to real life?