Despite its pun, Waterlog is not quite a catalogue of an exhibition; rather it documents, expands — and in some cases might seem to seek to justify — the contents of an exhibition held first in Norwich and now in Lincoln to honour the East Anglian resonances of the writer W. G. Sebald. It clearly would like to be judged in its own right. Just the fact that it speaks of the exhibition in the past tense, even though published between the two dates, gives it that vividly elusive quality so admired among attributes of Sebald that always demand similarly oxymoronic description.
Sebald seems to inspire in others a frustration not to have been him, or a need to be him again, an energy akin to Sebald’s narrator’s sense in The Rings of Saturn, of having lived the late Michael Hamburger’s life himself.
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