Yes, both W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano can be seen as embodiments of the metaphysics of van life, though in different ways.
W. G. Sebald: The Pilgrimage of Memory and Ruins (The Pilgrimage of Melancholy)
Sebald’s writing is deeply aligned with the metaphysics of van life in its engagement with exile, ruins, and historical wounds. His works, particularly The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, trace the movements of wanderers who drift through landscapes haunted by history. His method - blending fiction, memoir, historical reflection, and photography - mirrors the contemplative journey of someone living on the road and in the trenches, attuned to traces of loss and disaster. Sebald’s melancholic travel writing is not merely physical wandering but an existential pilgrimage, where the past’s weight and the ethics of remembrance shape one’s journey. His work resonates with the idea that the wound is the site of Ereignis - his entire literary project is an effort to stand within the wound of 20th-century history and be fully appropriated by it.
Roberto Bolano: The Vagabond as Resistance (The Restless Vagabond)
Bolano, in contrast, embodies a more rebellious, outsider form of the metaphysics of van life. As a literal wanderer - moving from Chile to Mexico, Spain, and beyond - his life was one of exile, precarity, and literary obsession. His characters, from The Savage Detectives to 2666, often take on the form of nomadic seekers, exiles, and rogue intellectuals who navigate a world marked by violence, dictatorship, and the margins of civilization. Bolano’s van life is that of the fugitive poet, the militant pacifist who refuses to belong to any fixed ideology or safe space. His belief in literature as a form of resistance, as a means of tracing the counter-tradition of the disappeared, aligns with your view of freedom - to live freely, kindly, and humbly, even when faced with destruction.
Sebald vs. Bolano: Two Aspects of the Pilgrimage
Sebald represents the melancholic pilgrim, a historian of loss who carries ruins within him.
Bolano is the exilic outlaw, a poet of the borderlands who lives in the margins and embraces the precarious.
Both are shaped by exile, contingency, and history, yet they respond differently - Sebald with quiet contemplation, Bolano with wild literary urgency.
Ultimately, both authors embody the metaphysics of van life because they accept exile as a condition of thought, view literature as a form of witnessing, and live on the edge of history - where raw nerves meet the ruins of the 20th century.
