W.G. Sebald

[A Common Reader]

"All great works of literature either found a genre or dissolve one" (Walter Benjamin), and Sebald?s books are quite unique, baring a resemblance to nothing which has gone before, and almost certainly being followed by no books quite like them. Sebald creates thoughts in us which are entirely our own, helping us discover something which has always been there, but unrecognised, until the convoluted prose of Sebald has penetrated into out own depths to release something precious from its swirling eddies.

Unique to Sebald is his use of images, grainy black and white photographs scattered throughout his text. Sometimes these photographs are "found" images which Sebald used for his own purposes, other times, they are photographs taken by himself. The images are always untitled and enigmatic, sometimes enlightenting, other times misleading.

It is difficult to recommend a first Sebald book, but my personal recommendation would be Vertigo - a sort of travelogue, in which Sebald travels across the Alps to Italy and then returns to his home town in Germany. Travel however is not the point - the digressions, reflections and descriptions of his state of mind are what makes the book typical of Sebald's work.

Tom
www.acommonreader.org.uk

[Eric]

I keep intending to read a book by Sebald, but haven't got round to it. Though I have got "Schwindel. Gef?hle", Melancholische dwaalwegen", and "Vertigo" by him. This is the same novel in German, Dutch and English.

What intrigues me is how the titles are all different. The German one means "Vertigo. Feelings". The Dutch change it completely into "Melancholy Meanderings" while the English title gets rid of the feelings, or sentiments. I wonder how the choice of title affects sales and appreciation.

The pictures are curious, but Laurence Sterne did something similar in "Tristram Shandy", where his blank page and other eccentricities are pictures, rather than illustrations. Sebald's prose style is rather special. The Dane, Peter Adolphsen, whose "Machine" has recently appeared in English, took a leaf or two out of Sebald's book.

Max Sebald, as he was known (his first Christian name being "Winfried"), worked at the University of East Anglia for some thirty years, latterly heading the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). I remember passing him in the corridor when I was an undergrad there, in the early 1970s. I took no notice of him. Twenty years later, when he was working for the BCLT, I did have brief conversations with him - in those same corridors at UEA. He was always quiet and unassuming. I think it took UEA quite a while to realise that their quiet German literature lecturer doubled up as a major and innovative German novelist. But then, unfortunately, he was killed in a car crash.

I shall try to get round to reading "Vertigo" this year.

[A Common Reader]

Hi Eric

Thanks for the personal reminiscence! You had "brief conversations" with quite a cult figure as you probably realise. I suppose what you say confirms Sebald's writings in that it is above all "interior" - nothing shows on the surface. What I have learned about him from reading The Emergence of Memory (http://www.acommonreader.org.uk/2008/04/review-the-emer.html) by Lynne Sharon Schartz is that "quiet and unassuming" as you put it describes him perfectly.

I encountered Sebald through an interest in East Anglia which caused me to come across the Rings of Saturn. However, it was through spending a few days alone in an hotel reading Austerlitz which made me realise that this man spoke to my own state of mind at that time almost perfectly.

Incidentally, the photos themselves have quite a power of their own causing some people to try to capture the same inspiration themselves. I started a photosharing group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/sebald/) (only 15 members so far) where we post photos that echo the mood or atmosphere of Sebald's writings.

I am not familiar with Tristam Shandy but am interested to hear that there are synergies with an author some 300 years earlier.

[nnyhav]

via lunaparkreview's new blog (ttp://lunaparkblog.wordpress.com/), WGS is featured in Hamish & Hamilton's 5Dials#5 (http://www.hamishhamilton.co.uk/files/fivedials_no5.pdf) [pdf], including Max's maxims from last class at UEA.

(also, 4 translators on the 2nd oldest profession)

[Julie]

Eric, I hope you end up (wound up) reading Vertigo in whichever language. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts. I read it last year while I was in the UK for the first time, (an American university student, I was mostly traveling by myself and a bit sick at heart) and found it to be an invaluable companion--he was traveling alone himself and his thoughts on traveling relieved a bit of my own anxiety as I wasn't really experiencing any of the supposed profound transformations of travel that one hears too much, too often about.

I finished Rings of Saturn a few weeks ago, and I'm about to read The Emigrants. (Coincidentally, I'm also about to start Tristram Shandy). Sebald must be one of my favorite writers...I feel like I'm being simultaneously punched in the gut and succored. I have to find the top of my head once I'm finished.

I read that Sebald worked closely with his English translators... so I'm curious to know if anyone's read both the German and English.

[Eric]

Frustratingly, my copies of Vertigo in German, English and Dutch are in a box in storage. So I can't do any comparisons.

Why they knocled the "feelings" out of the English title, I do not know. I believe the German is Schwindel. Gef?hle. However, assuming that Sebald, who did after all spend the last 30 years of his life at UEA in Norwich, worked closely with his English translator(s), he will have corrected the more subtle points.

[Julie]

Ooh, let me be more accurate... in his translator's note to Unrecounted (poetry), Michael Hamburger writes that Sebald was "so meticulous over the editing of his writings that he spend hundreds of hours on the checking of their English versions" that "even the finished copy of the English Austerlitz he inscribed and gave to my wife...contains emendations in his hand, after the book's publication."

Hamburger also mentions that the time around the completion of Austerlitz (2001) was a "time of crisis" for Sebald, seemingly implying that Sebald's relation to his work was changing. So it's possible that his work could be divided into the prose done before Austerlitz (tr. Anthea Bell), Vertigo, The Emigrants, Rings of Saturn (these three tr. Michael Hulse) and that done after. It's sad to think of the anxiety he might have felt for the work translated after he died.

But Eric, if you ever do get to it, just remember to come back here and report. :)

[hdw]

I've just been listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, and James Naughtie was talking to Will Self and to Amanda Hopkinson of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) about W.G. Sebald. Self is due to give the annual W.G. Sebald lecture tonight, and is obviously a Sebald enthusiast. He insisted on giving a short reading from Austerlitz, which seems to be his favourite Sebald book.

Harry

[Eric]

Harry, what did they discuss in the programme? From my very brief encounters with Sebald (corridors at UEA, mid-1990s) he was the very antithesis of Will Self. I would opine that the only thing they could have had in common is the first two letters of their surnames...

Julie: Sebald was, as far as I know, killed in a tragic car accident, no fault of his own. It is awful that a talented novelist should end in this way. But life is not always fair to the gifted. Sebald worked quietly at a British university for the last 30 years of his life. Now he is dead and cannot comment, too many people seem to have jumped on the posthumous bandwagon of what he achieved before the epigones started imitating him. I want to read him in peace, without the chorus of claque.

[Daniel del Real]

I found no thread on W.G Sebald at the forum and although I'm the less indicated person to open it (haven't read anything by him)I decided to do it since he's an author I've heard a lot of praise about.
There's no need to add the wiki link as it is very short in English. What I'm looking for in here is for people to share their reading experiences with Sebald and recommend something of his work to start with. What would be a good starting point for this author?

[sebaldetude]

There are other Sebald threads on this forum, see below.

To me, he is the very greatest (a big claim I know) that i have read; or, to put it more personally, apart from the authors who helped me accept my sexual orentation(gay) in my twenties, he has had the profoundest effect on me. I know subjective/opinion is certainly not "objective" truth; in fact, i tend towards the "death of the Author" rather than the close reading/concentrate on the author's(perceived, because we can rarely know)intention school of reading

But I would back up my absolutely(admittedly) MASSIVE claim on these grounds:

1. His prose style is exquisite, and, whilst it shares the hypnotic, multiclaused rhythms of Bernard and Ishiguro's excellently mesmerising "The Unconsoled", it also has a poetry in the language, which emerges despite it being written in German and I do not read German, but it has been translated by excellent writers in their own right(Michael hamburger, for one, the poet)and reads as if written in English.At first I thought it was just a digressive list, endlessly spiralling off at tangents, though you learn later(and sebaldian criticism has helped here) that everything is linked. But do not start with "the Rings of saturn" as it is VERY discursive and may put you off.
2. He deals with weighty and moving subjects. As an(exiled) German, whose father was a Nazi Officer, he found it very hard to live with his German nationality and what happened under the National Socialists(so emmigrated to the UK). He believed it was only possible, especially as someone from his background, to speak of the Holocaust in a circumlocutory way; so he circles round it(the nearest he ever comes is a pre-death camp at Theresienstadt, described in "Austerlitz"). He nearly allways writes re characters who were written out of history, ie physically destroyed, or, if not so, pychologically derelict or fragile: about two thirds of his characters are displaced Jews(eg "The Emmigrants") and, very unusually, for a non-gay writer, about a third of his characters have same sex preferences and are marginalised, victimised or invisibilised because of that(there is an ineffably poignant description of a homosexual/gay couple in "The Emmigrants", Cosmo and Ambros,{ who was actually related to Sebald}; and Kafka, who was AT LEAST bisexual, is described as wanting something-the love of another man-which puts him at the mercy of the jackboot of history("Vertigo", "Dr. K. takes the Waters at Riva", an obvious reference to the mass killings and ill treatments of homosexuals, Jews, travelling people, circumsized people and other perceived "minorities" by the Nazis)

I would recommend you both start with "Austerlitz" because his labarynthine prose style DOES take some habituation; give it 100 pages before you decide!Just let it flow over you. It is one of the most narrative -based of his books. It is also, like all his prose fiction(because they are so much more than novels and cross numberless genre boundaries)full of the famous sebaldian "embedded photographs", which act, contrapuntally,in the text, to highlight themes, deep or passing or both. They are grainy and sepia. Very haunting and add to the general air of desuetudinousness. Which is not to say that Sebald is without his dry humour.

So, good luck and let me know what you both think!
decayetude.wordpress.com is one of my blogs. It has no commercial purpose but I mention it because it is sebaldian in style, and has two short essays on him

[Mirabell]

I still think it's fascinating how much better known Sebald is in the UK/US than he is in Germany. At least that used to be the case, he's gained some fame these past years.