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Published: 26 January, 2012
by DAN CARRIER

Certificate PG

Rating: 4 Out Of 5 Stars

It is 10 years since the writer WG Sebald got behind the wheel of his car, drove down a small Suffolk lane, had a heart attack and crashed.

His passing was much mourned by those who knew him, those who had been taught English literature by him, and those fortunate enough to have discovered his sadly few books.

Sebald’s premature passing has robbed us of an extraordinary voice – and his legacy has yet to have been celebrated to the degree his works deserve.

This film is the start, I hope, of giving Sebald a wider audience that his extraordinary books deserve.

Sebald’s tome The Emigrants totally fooled me when I first read it: was this a novel?

It felt like it, but then again, it contained photographs of the people in the story, so was it a memoir?

It also felt like travel writing, too – a strange mixture, that trendy internet jockeys would call a “mash up”.

And that is one of the things Gee has done so well – he has created a film that is a cocktail of genres: a biography, literary criticism, an appreciation and a travelogue through the Fenlands of Suffolk.

Sebald’s early death meant he didn’t write as much as his fans would have liked.

But, as this film shows, what he did pen before his death in 2001 was held in high esteem by the likes of Sir Andrew Motion and Iain Sinclair, who chip in their thoughts on Sebald’s works.

They are joined by others from a variety of disciplines – travel writers and critics, artists, photographers, film-makers and theatre directors – all have been touched by his work.

We learn a little about his background. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and moved to teach at the University of Manchester in 1966 before taking up the post of Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia.

His time in Suffolk – and the book on the area he wrote called The Rings of Saturn – are the basis of this strange and compelling documentary on his life.

Perhaps the best trick played by Gee is to manage to give a sense of Sebald’s haunting books in a different medium.

Gee’s riff on visiting Lowestoft, as he follows in Sebald’s footsteps, captured the loneliness of that North Sea town: I once spent an afternoon there while in the midst of a strange relationship and his take on the once-thriving port and resort was incredibly poignant.