Robert Ronsson
Robert outside Isherwood's house in Berlin (the setting for 'Goodbye to Berlin')
Robert has been writing full-time since 2005. He is a National Academy of Writing prizewinner and his work featured in the Academy's anthologies in 2008, 2009 and 2010. He has won first prizes in three national short story competitions and has been shortlisted or commended in many others. BBC Radio4 shortlisted two of his stories for their Opening Lines afternoon readings and he was shortlisted for the 2010 Bridport Prize.
The manuscript of The Year of Burning Hay, Robert's first novel, is hidden at the back of a drawer but he believes that the second, No Mean Affair, has the quality and marketability to merit mainstream publication. It is a fast-moving account of love and socialist politics in Glasgow and Westminster in the first two decades of the twentieth century. His work-in-progress, The Sting Inside, has two parallel narratives: one set in post-9/11 New York and the other in pre-WW2 Berlin. In it a 9/11 survivor is tormented by guilt and develops twin obsessions: his Jewish roots and the musical Cabaret. A stranger from the musical's milieu provides resolution.
The manuscript of The Year of Burning Hay, Robert's first novel, is hidden at the back of a drawer but he believes that the second, No Mean Affair, has the quality and marketability to merit mainstream publication. It is a fast-moving account of love and socialist politics in Glasgow and Westminster in the first two decades of the twentieth century. His work-in-progress, The Sting Inside, has two parallel narratives: one set in post-9/11 New York and the other in pre-WW2 Berlin. In it a 9/11 survivor is tormented by guilt and develops twin obsessions: his Jewish roots and the musical Cabaret. A stranger from the musical's milieu provides resolution.
A German with a sense of humour?
I am writing this on 14 December 2011.* It's the tenth anniversary of the death of W G Sebald who was born in Germany in 1944 and spent the majority of his adult life in Britain. He wrote in his native tongue and was translated into English. The UK's literary elite regards him as one of the finest authors of the 20th Century.
His most revered book, The Rings of Saturn, is the product of his alleged perambulation along a section of the East Anglian coastal path. I use the word alleged because there is evidence that the walk never happened. However, the book is categorised as 'fiction' so why should Sebald's walk be any more true than Phileas Fogg's peregrinations?
If we read on, we learn about herrings that are red in death and he illustrates his discourse on the herring with a picture of a cod. Red herrings? Cod illustrations? Could he have made it any clearer that the book is no more than an extended deception? Yet 'people who know' extol its brilliant allusions and power of its extraordinary allegories.
Sebald himself writes in the book about, ‘a novel that would fly in the face of palpable facts and become entangled in contradictions in such a way that few readers – very few readers – would be able to grasp the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative.’ I believe that he is describing Rings.
Rings threatens to bursts its bindings with: the narrator’s ‘unedited’ meanderings; paragraphs that extend through page after page; deliberate confusion of the first person; and graphics that confound rather than enlighten. Sebald deliberately employs them to unsettle the reader, cloud the insight or both.
Whatever his motive, I believe the book shatters that most sacred of contracts – the one between the writer and the reader that leads to shared understanding. And this deceit at the heart of this work makes me feel like the small boy in the cheering crowd who dares to whisper, ‘but the Emperor is naked'.
When I told a fellow scribbler, whose opinion I respect, that I found Sebald's The Rings of Saturn difficult, he said, 'Read Austerlitz, you cantankerous old git. It's even better than Rings. Austerlitz is his Meisterwerk.' So I paid good money and started to read.
I reached page 218 before I gave up. (I joked to my friend that this was halfway through the first paragraph but actually there may have been a few breaks up to this point.) Here is the sentence that did it for me. (The context is that the adult Austerlitz meets his old nursemaid, Vera, in Prague after a gap of many years):
It was through an interest in every aspect of French civilization, she added, something which as an enthusiastic student of Romance culture I shared with both Agata and Maximilian, that a friendship began to develop between us immediately after our first conversation the day they moved in, a friendship which led as if quite naturally, so Vera told me, said Austerlitz, to her offering, since unlike Agata and Maximilian she had time largely at her own disposal, to assume the duties of nanny for the few years until I started nursery school.
Trust me – this is exactly as it appears in the book.
If any novice wrote this sentence any (and I mean any) editor or agent worth their salt would throw the manuscript in the bin without a second glance. How did Sebald get away with it?
Everybody tells me Sebald is quality; I think he's 'aving a laugh.
(*I actually wrote this over a week after this date. How very Sebaldian of me to mislead you!)
His most revered book, The Rings of Saturn, is the product of his alleged perambulation along a section of the East Anglian coastal path. I use the word alleged because there is evidence that the walk never happened. However, the book is categorised as 'fiction' so why should Sebald's walk be any more true than Phileas Fogg's peregrinations?
If we read on, we learn about herrings that are red in death and he illustrates his discourse on the herring with a picture of a cod. Red herrings? Cod illustrations? Could he have made it any clearer that the book is no more than an extended deception? Yet 'people who know' extol its brilliant allusions and power of its extraordinary allegories.
Sebald himself writes in the book about, ‘a novel that would fly in the face of palpable facts and become entangled in contradictions in such a way that few readers – very few readers – would be able to grasp the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative.’ I believe that he is describing Rings.
Rings threatens to bursts its bindings with: the narrator’s ‘unedited’ meanderings; paragraphs that extend through page after page; deliberate confusion of the first person; and graphics that confound rather than enlighten. Sebald deliberately employs them to unsettle the reader, cloud the insight or both.
Whatever his motive, I believe the book shatters that most sacred of contracts – the one between the writer and the reader that leads to shared understanding. And this deceit at the heart of this work makes me feel like the small boy in the cheering crowd who dares to whisper, ‘but the Emperor is naked'.
When I told a fellow scribbler, whose opinion I respect, that I found Sebald's The Rings of Saturn difficult, he said, 'Read Austerlitz, you cantankerous old git. It's even better than Rings. Austerlitz is his Meisterwerk.' So I paid good money and started to read.
I reached page 218 before I gave up. (I joked to my friend that this was halfway through the first paragraph but actually there may have been a few breaks up to this point.) Here is the sentence that did it for me. (The context is that the adult Austerlitz meets his old nursemaid, Vera, in Prague after a gap of many years):
It was through an interest in every aspect of French civilization, she added, something which as an enthusiastic student of Romance culture I shared with both Agata and Maximilian, that a friendship began to develop between us immediately after our first conversation the day they moved in, a friendship which led as if quite naturally, so Vera told me, said Austerlitz, to her offering, since unlike Agata and Maximilian she had time largely at her own disposal, to assume the duties of nanny for the few years until I started nursery school.
Trust me – this is exactly as it appears in the book.
If any novice wrote this sentence any (and I mean any) editor or agent worth their salt would throw the manuscript in the bin without a second glance. How did Sebald get away with it?
Everybody tells me Sebald is quality; I think he's 'aving a laugh.
(*I actually wrote this over a week after this date. How very Sebaldian of me to mislead you!)