Excerpt: Chapter One: Departures

2001 C.E; 1422 A.H; 5761 (Jewish); 4698 (Chinese)

   On Friday 14th December 2001, when the dog days were drawing to an end, the writer Max Sebald set off with his daughter Anna to drive across Norfolk, no doubt in the hope – I am paraphrasing the opening of his novel "The Rings Of Saturn" – of dispelling the emptiness that took hold of him whenever he had completed a long stint of work. His greatest opus yet, the novel "Austerlitz", had just been published to exaggerated critical acclaim and general neglect, and already the foolhardy hyperbolists, encouraged I imagine by his publisher's marketing department, were suggesting his name as a future Nobel laureate. Professor of Modern German Literature (being German it is necessary to put all these abstractions into capitals) at the University of East Anglia, author of four of the strangest yet most enticing intellectual voyages set to paper in the last years of the twentieth century – alongside "The Rings of Saturn" and "Austerlitz" there were also "Vertigo" and "The Emigrants" – he was just fifty-seven years old and had scarcely taken off the surface of the furrow he was ploughing: the attempt of a German, born after the end of World War Two, to redeem his nation's history from the ravages of indestructible time. What precisely happened is as unclear as his own plots; possibly a heart attack, possibly a failure of road management by one or both drivers. His car collided with a lorry at a bend close to his home, and what remains after the coroner is the re-evaluation of posterity.

   I heard about his death that morning on the news, like him driving in a car with my daughter, myself almost involved in a collision when the damned fool of a learner driver stalled at a roundabout and a lorry, not anticipating a hiatus in the flow of traffic, swerved into my lane to avoid her. Hannah had just completed her Grade 5 violin exam, and I was taking her for lunch before returning her to school. While she ordered our Burger Kings, I stepped into the adjacent bookshop and bought my hardback "Austerlitz", wrote in it the date, and noted the author’s death. Having intended to wait for the paperback, this seemed the right response, the perfect homage; and over that weekend I read the book almost without stopping, moved as I had not been since Bruce Chatwin’s death, and before his the deaths of Borges and Lawrence Durrell, by an enormous sense of universal loss; but more than that, by a kind of anger that was egocentric in the extreme; anger that by this death I had been deprived of all those future books he surely would have written had he lived. Only a comment in the next day’s paper, that another novel, "Airwar", written two decades earlier, was due for publication shortly, helped to mollify this, though I have yet to see any evidence of that book's appearance.

   There was one other thought however, akin to putting flowers on his grave; that somebody should write Max's biography, but that it shouldn't be one of the usual round of literary hacks who supplement their incomes by "doing" the biographies of the briefly famous. What was needed was a biography in Sebald's own voice, in his own style; indeed, in his own automythological first person. Perhaps not even a biography, but a novel, in which he was an occasional and yet the central figure, part factual, part fictional, part autograph, part mime. It is not a book that I am capable of writing, for lack of knowledge of the facts, let alone the time to find them out. Instead, I have written this journey in time; and perhaps, in some obscure manner, it is that book.