INCIDENTS ALONG THE ROAD

A middle-aged writer with a love of walking and picaresque narratives, Will Self felt an increasing affinity with the much celebrated work of WG Sebald. So what happened when he sent his sensibility (his body following close behind) on a Sebaldian adventure along the collapsing cliffs of the Holderness coast?

Will Self in The Guardian, Saturday 7 February 2009

Pic left - The Holderness coast of East Yorkshire. Photograph: Les Gibbon/Alamy

Reading WG Sebald I felt a growing affinity, although not with the man himself - I never met, let alone knew him - nor with humanity in general. Indeed, immersed in Sebald, the inversion of Schopenhauer's dictum "The more I love mankind, the less I love men" often occurs to me: the more his fictional alter ego reverences individual men and women, the less he seems to love mankind.

I couldn't say exactly what my Sebaldian progression has been: there was reading and then rereading, so that passages from one text interpolated, Russian-doll-like, into another, much as his raconteur characters find their voice in the accents of Sebald's style. I suspect The Rings of Saturn came first, followed by The Emigrants, followed by Austerlitz. Then I tackled the lectures Sebald gave in Zurich in 1997, published under the title On the Natural History of Destruction.

Read Will Self's full piece at The Guardian online.