Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Ariadne’s Thread: In Memory of W G Sebald
Author: COMBER PHILIPPA
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 05/09/2014
Imprint: PROPOLIS PRESS
Price: $36.00
Publishing status: Active
….Philippa Comber’s Ariadne’s Thread is the first book-length portrait. A psychotherapist and long-term Berlin resident, Comber arrived in Norwich in 1980 after her marriage failed, to run a psychiatric daycare centre. In 1981 she met Sebald, also in his late 30s, on a group outing to Roman Polanski’s film Tess . They hit it off and Sebald began to drop round; visits involving long discussions of writing and film.
There was a frisson, on Comber’s side at least, though her hopes dimmed the week her father died. When she entreated Sebald to come round and keep her company, he declined because, he said, needed to walk his dog. When Comber began a new relationship in 1985, the friendship went into hiatus, reigniting sporadically between 1988 and 1996, then petering out until just before Sebald’s death.
Though focused on a four-year period, the book offers a valuable portrait of Sebald struggling to move into fiction: overworked, elusive and performatively lugubrious, able to reduce friends to fits of helpless laughter with his accounts of personal disaster, though Comber suggests, this was a kind of protective mask. In Rings of Saturn the narrator alludes cryptically to a period of illness sparking his travels. Here Comber reveals Sebald suffered two periods of serious mental turmoil and hinted at some severe trauma blocking his writing. In 1982, he asked Comber to act as his analyst, a request she refused because she still hoped for a closer friendship.
Comber’s detailed account of their shared reading is fascinating. A keen gardener, Sebald delighted in quizzing Comber about her English family’s links to 17th-century gardener and diarist John Evelyn; together they read his description of visiting the great East Anglian essayist Thomas Browne and his riveting account of the Great Fire of London. Browne’s essay Urn Burial would become one of the touchstones of The Rings of Saturn — and Sebald would end Vertigo with diarist Samuel Pepys’s apocalyptic vision of London in flames during the same fire.
But this is no straightforward memoir. As her title suggests, Comber pays homage to Sebald by adapting his labyrinthine approach, interleaving their story with excursions into her own very full life. This works brilliantly when Comber tells us about her lifelong friend, Christine. Her father, she would learn later, was Werner Heisenberg, responsible not only for the famous uncertainty principle but Germany’s nuclear program — a truly Sebaldian connection. Comber’s juxtaposition of Heisenberg’s diary accounts of World War II bombings with Sebald’s German childhood powerfully invokes the role of coincidence — of terrible chance that is not chance — in Sebald’s fiction.
As a psychoanalyst, Comber is also a kind of Ariadne (Minos’s daughter controlled his Cretan maze). But her decision to offer professional insights into Max works against the allusive, web-like delicacy of her narrative model. (A man “deeply afraid of his physicality” is her diagnosis, which seems a little nfair.)….http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/philippa-combers-ariadnes-thread-recalls-her-friendship-with-wg-sebald/story-fn9n8gph-1227129641078
ISBN: 9780992946005
Dimension: 198mm X 129mm
Pages: 270