Today is World Book Day. There are readings, and competitions, and publishers are randomly giving away books. Giving people books that they might actually like, as distinct from giving something that the donor likes, or thinks the recipient ought to like, or doesn't have a clue if they'll like but hell, it's a present and the would-be gift-giver is out of time or ideas, is a tricky business. It helps if the target of your generosity has a reasonably large intellectual hinterland, some hobbies or interests. It also helps greatly if you have access to their bookshelves to find out what they've already got, or at least an idea of what they're likely to have bought for themselves.
I like buying history books for other people who are interested in history, because I know enough about it to judge where the book is coming from, and whether the author is a trained historian, or a jobbing journalist, or has a particular political axe to grind, as well as the touchy-feely stuff like is it on nice paper and are there lots of good pictures. I'll give it a go with railway books, though trains are not my thing personally. Fiction is difficult. Aim too highbrow and you bore and baffle the recipient, who will wistfully think of all the things they could have got instead. Aim too middlebrow or lowbrow and you insult them. And to give anybody you're supposed to be close to a book that they simply don't connect with is painful. It suggests you are not so close as you thought you were. Why on earth, he/she will think, do they think I would like this? I've given a lot of fiction away over the years, and I'm afraid a significant portion of it has failed to hit the spot, but then I've received a few duff, weird and baffling volumes back. Of course sometimes you are given a book that you love, that you didn't even know existed, and this makes you think that the donor must truly be a soul-mate.
Instead of taking the risk of giving a book to anybody on World Book Day I will merely make a recommendation. The last work of fiction I read was The Emigrants by W G Sebald. This was as a follow-on to Austerlitz by the same author, which I read last year. The Emigrants consists of four disconnected narratives, each telling the life story of a European Jew displaced to the UK or US. Austerlitz is a longer narrative on the same theme. All the stories are told by an un-named first-person narrator, who themself sounds so lost and solitary that they could be the emigrant of the title, but in each case it turns out that this is somebody else's story. That story often starts in the middle, with the emigrant's life in their new country, before looping back in time, maybe on a subsequent meeting with the narrator, to take in their European childhood and departure from the land of their birth. Through the device of a bundle of letters or journal being passed to the narrator the story often then switches further back in time, to a friend or relative's story, unfolding layer within layer like an onion. The tone of the prose is cool, even, and detached, with small remembered details standing out with curious, gripping clarity. Sebald does not tell us what to think. We are shown an artist working in his studio in the industrial north of England, repeatedly building up the painted surface and scraping it away again. We are left to ourselves to make the parallel between his method of working, and the traumatic and total loss of his family and country.
Sebald himself moved from his native Bavaria to England in 1966, and stayed here for the rest of his life, though he wrote in Geman, so I have only read his astonishing and beautiful books in translation. He died in a car accident in 2001. There will not be any more books. Read the ones there are.
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