I’m unsure why this book was recommended as a text for this course, apart from a few mentions of paintings it wasn’t related directly to the art world. This book is highly regarded as an important text but I’m afraid it wasn’t for me. It is interesting from a historical perspective, or if you knew the geographical region, but for me it just didn’t click. Perhaps if I’d finished it, it would have come together but it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere.
I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this book much and gave up half way through. We don’t know why he has become ill but the way the book is written it feels like his mental health is affected. It feels like the narrator is unable to focus. He then immediately jumps on to another reminiscence of a similar view he once saw on another journey. It feels like there are so many loose ends when reading the book. We then expect these characters to be an important part of the anecdote and we hold them in our minds but they never reappear.
He recounts a journey to Holland, describes the hotel and introduces the reader to various characters along the way. The book is full of observations, to the point where they disrupt the flow of the text. His method of jumping, seemingly at random, from fact to fact and memory to memory, I found distracting.
It is quite a slow moving recount of his journey and I found it quite monotonous. His description of Lowestoft and the surrounding area is very bleak, using words like seedy, cheap and cheerless. Sebolds narrative is incredibly poetic and expressive but can be quite morose and depressing at times. It is in essence, a collection of the narrator’s thoughts. Each location elicits a different recollection which in turn leads to a passage regarding an event that happened or a person he once met. It is essentially a series of observations, memories and historical facts that unfolds as he moves from place to place. It is much more than a travel journal however. The narrator’s journey (we never find out his name) starts in August 1992 but is brought to an end when he becomes very ill one year later and he starts this book while recuperating in hospital. It’s not clear if the book is autobiographical or it is a piece of fiction. This book is a translation from German in the form of a travel journal of a year long walk through the county of Suffolk.
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