The Sea View Has Me Again
Uwe Johnson in Sheerness
Published on 8. December 2020
751 pages
978-1-912248-75-9 (ISBN)
Description
Towards the end of 1974, a stranger arrived in the small town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He could often be found sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking lager and smoking Gauloises while flicking through the pages of the Kent Evening Post.
"Charles" was the name he offered to his new acquaintances.
But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he mean by detecting a "moral utopia" in a town that others, including his concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to "deindustrialisation" and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded bombs?
Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months before Johnson arrived, returns to the "island that is all the world" to uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own "island stories", the book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens out to provide an alternative version of modern British history: a history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.
"Charles" was the name he offered to his new acquaintances.
But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he mean by detecting a "moral utopia" in a town that others, including his concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to "deindustrialisation" and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded bombs?
Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months before Johnson arrived, returns to the "island that is all the world" to uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own "island stories", the book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens out to provide an alternative version of modern British history: a history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.
Reviews / Votes
"A monumental sifting and arranging of local particulars, stitched against the savage farce of a great European novelist's elective exile... Patrick Wright has picked over the landfill of a very specific Estuary culture to devastating effect." "A double 'biography' of the great but always tempestuous German writer Uwe Johnson and his ultimate home, the gritty and disreputable Isle of Sheppey. 'Biography' is in quotes because Wright is a saboteur of genres and his books encompass multiple worlds. I stand in awe of what he has accomplished here." "A masterful modernist history, and Patrick Wright's most important book, bringing Europe to England by showing it has always been here, at a moment when too many want to believe something else." "An extraordinary, haunting book... a phenomenal achievement." "An astonishing chronicle of the great German author Uwe Johnson, who moved to Sheerness, Kent, in the 70s." "To repeat: this tidal book, reaching into everything and then withdrawing to show what is left behind, is a triumph." "A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate." "A huge achievement: a comprehensive portrait of a place and a person, and the best book about Brexit that's yet been written." "A glorious rabbit hole of a book ... a longue duree portrait, from the 17th century to Thatcher, of a single location on the edges of British national life." "Wright plays both the anatomist and the elegist for the blighted modernity of seemingly forsaken spots such as Sheppey ... a fragmentary panorama of traumatic, half-remembered history, personal and national." "Thorough, discerning, compassionate." "The most involving and originally-conceived social history of modern England to have appeared in decades." "A hymn to estuarial peculiarity and a lament for an awkward man determined never to find his place." "I was entirely captivated by this microscopic, discursive study of Uwe Johnson... a great book about the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe, and not a page too long."More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Watkins Media Limited
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Reflowable
File size
14,45 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-912248-75-9 (9781912248759)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
06/2021
2nd Edition
Repeater Books
€25.00
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Book
12/2020
Repeater Books
€28.50
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
Patrick Wight is Emeritus Professor of Literature, Culture and Politics at Kings College, London. His books include The Village that Died for England, A Journey Through Ruins, and Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine.
