Knowing nothing about Saint Sebastian's Abyss aside from what I assume was a recommendation from an author I admire but have never actually read (it's Matt Bell's newsletter, which I've mentioned before, that brought him to my attention, though I now own two of his books), I believe it was the figure of Saint Sebastian himself on the cover that was the real attraction for me. I enjoy saints and their iconography, and Saint Sebastian has long been a particular favorite of mine. I probably have dozens of photos of Saint Sebastians I've encountered at museums. (I just tested Google Photos to see if it recognizes "Saint Sebastian" like it does "cat," for instance, and sadly it does not, but a quick search through a couple of my photo albums from Italy and Portugal yielded results.) My favorite Saint Sebastians are the ones who are shot through all over with arrows but seem not to suffer at all and I always take pictures of these when I find them.
The eponymous Saint Sebastian's Abyss, a painting by the fictional painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer, would not be one of these, I think, though despite discussing the painting at length, the figure of Saint Sebastian himself is hardly mentioned, if at all. We know that the background of the painting is an abyss; that a donkey stands perilously close to the precipice and that the reflection of a burning Jerusalem can be made out in reflection in the donkey's eye; that five apostles are also present. Saint Sebastian's Abyss chronicles the remnants of a friendship between two art critics, which was formed and destroyed over their mutual admiration for the painting. Over the course of a transatlantic flight, the narrator recounts his early discovery of the painting alongside a schoolmate called Schmidt. The pair built separate but intertwined careers writing about the painting and its creator (and to a lesser extent two other paintings by him, vastly inferior in the narrator and Schmidt's opinions, but his only other surviving works). The narrator's explanation for his and, in particular Schmidt's, strong – bombastic – opinions about art and the odd and repetitive way he has of relating facts and events make for a darkly comic portrait of their friendship.
