vertigo, or journeys terminable and interminable

W. G. Sebald was another writer who made much of coincidence without drawing any conclusions from it. Those of us who wondered why Vladimir Nabokov appears as a character in all four stories in The Emigrants learn from the new book (which collects interviews that appeared in many different publications) that Nabokov shows up in all four slightly fictionalized biographies because, without Sebald's having chosen them for that reason, all four individuals lived in or visited a town where Nabokov was living or visiting at the same moment. Each one could easily have intersected with Nabokov without being aware of it. The four lives are linked only by parallel experiences of exile and other outcomes, not by personal acquaintance. But once Sebald had encountered this improbable overlap with Nabokov, all it took was a suitably freighted appearance by an earnest butterfly chaser, and life itself had handed Sebald a symbol.

It's also astounding to learn the ratio of fact to fiction in the photographs in that novel; ninety per cent depict actual incidents from the lives of the people whose biographies Sebald is rendering in only modestly fictionalized form (one figure is a composite of two different people); he specifies which documentation he made up himself and photographed.

One of the most absurdly impossible-looking photographs, if we are to believe Sebald the interviewee, comes from an identifiable moment in 1913.

Photographs in the other books vary from Sebald's actual documentation to, as we surmised, an image that set off his thoughts about the similar sequence of events that he recounts. It's just that we are so often wrong when we try to guess which ones are complete fictions and which ones are illustrations of events only thinly fictionalized in the text. But he wants us neither to trust his visual sources nor to discount them. Sebald is criticized for being irremediably melancholy and humorless in his books, when he was tremendously funny to talk to; I suspect the books are full of little jokes that were as amusing to him as they were to me when I noticed them. We just aren't used to coming across them in this sort of fearsomely seriously and mysteriously uncategorizable writer.

It is paralyzing to literary production, to me at least, when life hands you too obvious a symbol. When one has decided that "Changing Planes in Prague," and some of you have dated e-mails that attest to this, had to end with the slogan from someone's user icon that reads "THE BEGINNING IS NEAR," and then one finds oneself at almost journey's end (Heathrow to Gatwick) sitting in an airport bus behind another airport bus which bears the slogan "The journey begins," one has been handed a symbol too crashingly obvious and artificial to be incorporated into a piece of literature. It can appear only in a non-fiction narrative. Like this one.