W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Seblad is unique, in my experience, in that his fiction is classified as such but does not read like fiction at all. He is the flip side of someone like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood -- a piece of journalism that for all the world reads like a novel. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, in particular, comes off like a combination of travelogue, memoir and, at times, textbook, but never a novel. Written in the first person, it is a meandering account of a man -- there is no doubt that it is Sebald himself -- wandering, mostly on foot, through the English countryside, occasionally meeting people, and seeing places and things that launch him on long historical asides that sometimes don't end up anywhere near where they started.

If this sounds like a curious book, it is, but ultimately, the strange style -- I'm not even sure if that is quite the word for it -- is largely irrelevant. For me, Sebald is all about the mood, and Rings is full of it. Subdued and melancholy, it never degenerates into outright brooding -- about the right balance for me these days. The thing that strikes one immediately is that large swaths of the narrator's world, at least until he meets whomever it is he set out to find, is almost completely devoid of people. The few that are present are always so remote -- fishermen on the beach observed from a tall cliff, an embracing couple on a distant hillside -- that they offer no human companionship at all. When he does finally meet his interlocutors, they are inevitably individuals, never groups, engaged in some solitary pursuit. It is a world that, while not entirely appealing, is one in which I instinctively feel comfortable. The darkness and weight do get intense at regular intervals, but even then I feel drawn in by the stark beauty of his scenes. One does not read Sebald to cheer oneself up.

The Emigrants, which I had read a while ago, uses the same approach, and I enjoyed it slightly more than Rings, perhaps because the latter book, during one or two of Sebald's historic/educational asides, does get just a touch polemical -- something I do not remember the other book doing, heavy on history though it was. And the last chapter, dedicated entirely to the history of sericulture, and from which the narrator is completely absent, feels tacked on as an afterthought. Still, on balance, The Rings of Saturn gave me many an enjoyable moment of contemplating the narrator's, and by extension my own, loneliness in the world.

2007 Leelanau Cellars Vignoles

The last of the bottles I brought back from Michigan last summer. Vignoles is an obscure grape used for blending in France, but a couple of wineries in Michigan make it as a varietal. L. Mawby even makes it into a sparkler. Anyway, Leelanau Cellars' Vignoles -- very fruity on the nose, melon, maybe a little cucumber. Some sweetness. On the palate, just a touch off-dry, rich and viscous for a white, with excellent acid. Definitely a food wine. I paired it with some pasta with an asparagus and ricotta sauce, and it worked well, the richness of the ricotta offsetting the wine. But it would stand up to something significantly more garlicky as well.