Comparable to other novels that animate the life of a real life personage – often while admitting only the barest deference to fictional disguise – Nelson’s narrative decision recalls Saul Bellow depicting philosopher Allan Bloom inRavelstein or Rachel Cusk vivifying D H Lawrence’s stay with Mabel Dodge Luhan inSecond Place. Nelson does not hew slavishly to Sebald’s biography in crafting the character of Max,yet many key correspondences with Sebald are adverted to over the course of the novel:Sebald’s critics,for example,such as Michael Hofmann.
Nelson repeats Hofmann’s charge of Sebald being a “postmodern pasticheur”,whose sentences “were oddly immobilised and paralysed[...] full of meandering Gothic digressions without the pleasantness or rigmarole of the novel”. (Nelson notes Max was born in the same year Kafka’s sister died,but is generous enough to elide Hofmann’s critique of Sebald’s Kafka homages.) Then there’s the German novelist Georg Klein’s accusation of Max/Sebald having “a contrived melancholic masochism towards the past,of claiming a false intimacy with the dead”.
Early in the novel,Cressida recounts an experience of sitting next to John Banville at a signing table,and of watching “a woman approach him clutching not a copy of his new book but a bunch of daffodils”:“She had fallen in love with him through his books,she said[...] she felt seen by him.” This is somewhat akin to what Nelson is doing with Sebald:romancing his memory.
Of course,given Sebald’s penchant for mixing fact and fiction,the novel also functions,not only as a way of bringing a fictionalised Sebald to the page,but as an homage to Sebald’s own narrative mode,in which fact and fiction were interwoven with no clear distinctions between the two.
In 1996,when Sebald’s biographer,Carole Angier,asked the author whether he based his characters on real people,Sebald replied,“essentially,yes,with some small changes”. In truth,as Angier learned,it was sometimes only the minor details that kept veracity with reality,while the major ones were fabricated.