In one sense Sebald’s use and depiction of repetition are historically specific, a German gentile’s reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust. It is far from his only concern, but it’s never far from any of his concerns. It is the tragedy he can neither responsibly “remember” (both because he wasn’t there and because artifice risks simplifying, supplanting the reality it supposedly depicts) nor forget. Angier’s title—in addition to constituting another Nabokov allusion—refers first and foremost to Sebald’s commitment to breaking what he called “the conspiracy of silence” surrounding the Nazi past in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. He never forgets, but he never pretends to have arrived at a form of remembering equal to a horror that exceeds representation; his melancholic repetitions become a way of addressing, and acknowledging the complexity of addressing, the genocide of the European Jewry.
But Sebald’s obsessive repetitions can also threaten to undermine historical specificity. This ambiguity is built into repetition as method: it concretizes and abstracts, heightens and flattens, focuses attention and disperses it, marks an event as significant at the cost of its singularity. Even the lightest of Sebald’s motifs, Nabokov, “the man with the butterfly net” who appears impossibly across The Emigrants, necessarily works against the individuality of each life that is being elegized. (This is the point, or part of it; the figures serve to declare artifice, to acknowledge fictionality.) The repetition that is doubling also blurs as much as it differentiates: Paul Bereyter, the teacher, is based on a teacher of Sebald’s, but he’s also clearly based on Wittgenstein.
By late afternoon, the newsroom had reopened, and the presses were rolling. Burlingtonians had their papers by 8 p.m., just three hours behind schedule, complete with a full-size photo of the fireball and aerial images from the scene. The blast had injured some workers, but miraculously no one died. It had shattered hundreds of windows downtown and sank a nearby barge.
Even now, veteran Hawk Eye staffers will tell you that the grain-elevator explosion was a career highlight. It gave them the kind of thrill that all reporters crave. But there was also a real sense of ownership to the story: This was Burlington’s disaster—an event with an immediate impact. There was no question that The Hawk Eye would cover it from every possible angle.
My formative understanding of world events had two acts: the ancient history conveyed in the Bible and the modern arc approximated at Disneyland, which opened in Southern California in 1955, four and a half decades before my first visit.
In Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, there are moments of pure clarity. In its explorations of corporate America, of familial loss and grief, and of 2008 recession-era life, the novel shines. But in its interstitial space, darting from one narrator to another in the tangled web of love, relationships, and confusion, the novel puzzles. This is not a book to read in an afternoon, but one to chew and digest over time. And when given this space, we still may not understand.
We all secretly want to believe that fame is awful and famous people are miserable. But Dave Grohl, superstar rock drummer, cheerful avatar of suburban averageness and puppy in human form, is here to tell you it’s actually pretty great. “Believe me,” he writes in his amiable, conversational new memoir, “The Storyteller,” life as a rock star “is all that it’s cracked up to be and more.”