W.G. Sebald

[Zlatko Waterman]

W.G. ("Max") Sebald, whose life was cut short by an auto accident in December of 2001, was one of the major writers in German of the postwar 20th century.

Sebald, called by some "the Einstein of memory", built his books out of a historiographer's fragments, welding the whole into freshly minted memories, his own skillfully combined with those of created and "nearly created" characters closely based on historical figures.

Brilliant in untangling the emotive streams of memory and re-fusing them into mysterious, sometimes smokily perceived scenes and personalities, Sebald combines the essence of Kafka, Musil, Proust and Borges, not to mention occasional tints of Nabokov.

But it all comes together as Sebald, navigating travel writing, history, even photography in the black-and-white illustrative photos bound inextricably into his text. His characters are fictional as is his narrator, no matter how closely the "I" seems to veer to his real self.

"The Threepenny Review" conducted a symposium in honor of Sebald when the writer died. It can be found here:


http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples ... _sp02.html

Below is a swatch from that symposium by one of its participants:


(paste)

Notwithstanding the disclaimer, the joy of reading Sebald is the pleasure of stepping into the quirky treasure-house of his mind. “I don’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “It’s like someone who builds a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. It’s devotional work. Obsessive.” His books are like some eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, filled with marvelous specimens, organized eccentrically. Even without the inclusion of the blurry black-and-white photographs that became a trademark, they would feel like journals or notebooks. Sebald himself, when I asked why every character in his novels sounded like the narrator, said, “It’s all relayed through this narrative figure. It’s as he remembers it, so it’s in his cast.” He credited the monologues of Thomas Bernhard, in which the layers of attribution can run four-deep, as an influence. Like an old-fashioned newspaper reporter in the era before blind quotes, Sebald believed in naming sources. “Otherwise, there’s either the ‘she said with a disconsolate expression on her face’—how does he know?—or ‘as thoughts of regret passed through her mind,’” he complained. “I find it hard to suspend my disbelief.” He was a literary magistrate who admitted nothing but hearsay as evidence. Or, to put it more precisely, he thought that a statement can no longer be evaluated once it is prised from the mind which gives it utterance.


Recommended Sebald reading:


"The Immigrants"

"The Rings of Saturn"


"Austerlitz"

" On The Natural History of Destruction"

"Vertigo"

[cornelius]

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