Here’s Robert McCrum with a quick-fix solution to various symptoms of literary malaise:
Whenever readers despair of contemporary book culture, pointing to the horrors of Dan Brown or EL James; or to the mind-blowing inanities of “writing classes”; or the death of bookselling; or the alleged crimes of Amazon, I have one simple answer: the name of a writer whose life and work – a strange and deep response to the atrocities of history – has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity. His name? Sebald.
McCrum proceeds to elaborate; he speaks of the ‘rich and productive afterlife’ of Sebald’s work. Fine by me: I was already convinced by The Emigrants, then bowled over by Austerlitz.
What puzzles me, however, is why anyone would ever despair over ‘book culture’. Now, I’m no theorist in this domain and I don’t keep up with the latest in opinion about the state of that culture. I just read one novel and then I read another and then another, and by and large I find this keeps me very happy. True, I am party to a fair bit of discussion between people who know a lot more than I do about it all, and I listen out to what they’re saying for likely tips to books that I might enjoy. But I’m not much bothered about whether things are up, down or in the middle so far as the state of literary culture goes; and this is because I figure the said culture has been going so long and contains so many riches that it has enough there to satisfy even the most voracious reader forever. What’s more, good books – and indeed great books – will go on being written, you can bet your house on that. The continuity is stronger than anything that could be wrought by some bad current trend. Maybe there’s a touch of complacency in this attitude of mine. I’m also not worried about whether jazz is alive or dead.