My little trek through the world of literature of the current century is slightly slowing down over the last month. The opening of a new book always bring with it some emotional investment. The last three books that I finished demanded even more than the usual: Leaving the Atocha Station by Lerner, Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro, Austerlitz by Sebald. This will be a short and sweet discussion of the last two, and is really a “feelings” and not a “literature, here’s quotes that support me” discussion.
As a side note, it’s not that Lerner’s book was bad. It felt like an author’s bildungsroman through the main character’s journey in Spain. Lerner is a poet meaning the language was actually lovely, but sometimes leaning on the everything-as-metaphor stream of consciousness which can be difficult to read. However, it’s just not as impactful as the other two.
Ishiguro’s book is set in a parallel universe where biological sciences advanced far beyond the capabilities of our current world to the point where clones are created for the sole purposes of organ harvesting. We follow one of these clones in the later years as she examines her life and relationships while attending a boarding school. Sebald’s is a fictional account of a immensely troubled man who is reflecting on his personal history as he figures out how he, a Czech Jew, arrived in Wales from Prague during the summer of 1939 as a 5 year old.
There’s a deep sense of tragedy in both of these stories which tantalized me. Neither authors actually explicitly go at length to discuss either the impending or past dooms which haunts our characters and constantly obfuscate. Ishiguro masks the truth with words like “complete” to denote the death of a clone, reminding me of Carlin’s bit on euphemisms, while Sebald’s narrator somehow always gets distracted, perhaps in a constant bid to procrastinate the discovery of the truth. They stand in contrast between the two, one of imminent death and one of the crippling past but neither fully articulating the magnitude of tragedy.
It’s almost as if we’re watching these characters swimming in the ocean with cuts and scrapes while silhouettes of sharks lurk beneath. I couldn’t look away even while knowing what fate will befall our hopeful protagonists. In a world where so much detail is explicitly stated for the readers, it’s actually refreshing to have things unspoken. Paired with the way both authors write, the effect is an ethereal experience.
Both also rely on the power of memory as an introspection tool, and grossly remind me of how terrible mine is (and how I should start journaling again). As our protagonists learn, they refract the past through this new prism. Sebald’s character finally understood why he suffered mental collapse at Marienbad while Ishiguro’s character, incorrectly, guessed the purposes of the “gallery”, which was a mystery until the end. This introspection all inevitably guided our characters to the future, past the last pages of the novels.
None of the two stories are complete by the end. Kathy, the clone, left her love interest before his final “donation” and got her first donation summons, while Austerlitz was still traveling to find the whereabouts of his father. If my reading of Sebald’s themes of the last few pages in Paris is correct, he will never find his father. History, especially the grotesque, is increasingly guarded. And Kathy will not escape her fate of donations, no matter how much humanity she displays; Ishiguro’s tale is not a hero’s conquest, but more of a melancholic struggle.
Why is good literature always so sad. Onto My Brilliant Friend. That should be a happier book.