Gay wg

‘A walking tour through the landscapes of the past, in the company of the exiled and the departed’ might have seemed an unusual choice for the bookgroup but this curious mix of memoir, fiction and meditation on writing also becomes ‘an essay for the dispossessed’ which would resonate with many gay readers. Added to that, Helen Finch in her groundbreaking publication ‘Sebald’s Bachelors’ points to the gender non-conforming themes within Sebald’s writing and is most obvious here in the preponderance of homosexual and homosocial histories of lives lived on the margins, on the edge of things.

The reading organization certainly picked up on these themes often tied up with the idea of the free man, and, anti-semitism. However, responses develop the group were as varied and the subjects covered in the guide itself; ‘the publication reminded me of fractals’, ‘left me feeling wistful’, ‘unsure of the motive for the writing’, ‘ sense of decay and transience’, ‘I felt pray as if in anticipation of something’. A few readers did not love the blurring of truth and fiction in this way and suspected of him of using this technique to tie things up too neatly.

Like many reviewers, the team also saw some common ground with the wr