A Place in the Country

October 7, 2013
In this posthumous collection of six essays by Sebald (1944–2001), the last of his major works to be translated into English, the author of Austerlitz, among other works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, uses critical appreciations of five writers and one painter to explore the nature of the creative persona. Like his fiction, Sebald’s essays are hybrid constructions, blending literary biography and personal essay, with photos included throughout. Although their careers span some 200 years, his subjects—Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and the contemporary painter Jan Peter Tripp—bear certain resemblances, as all are products of the same Alpine landscape. Sebald wants to understand “that peculiar behavioral disturbance” that makes writers write. In an effort to anatomize “the awful tenacity,” he draws upon biography, history, close reading, analogous works in other art forms, and his memories. He turns repeatedly to the “relentless strain of composition” and the circumstances under which authors, especially late in life, grapple with their artistic compulsion. Walser’s entry into a mental hospital in the 1930s echoes Rousseau’s 1765 retreat to Switzerland’s Île Saint-Pierre after he was banished from France. Given Sebald’s small oeuvre, Catling’s translation will be welcomed by his fans. Catling taught with Sebald in the last decade of his life, and her flowing translation pays crucial attention to the prosody and contours of Sebald’s sentences. Illus. Agent: the Wylie Agency.

December 15, 2013
The late German novelist's essays of appreciation for writers and artists whose influences pervade his work. The last book published by Sebald receives its first English translation, after it was issued in Europe in 1998. American readers will likely find it illuminating for its insight into the author's work and its obsessions, themes, and observations on home and exile. When he writes, in his essay on Rousseau, how "one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable," it's plain that this writer is also writing about himself. The longest, most ambitious and revelatory essay is subtitled "A Remembrance of Robert Walser," who was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, died institutionalized, and was little-known or -read when he was alive: "The traces that Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint to have almost been effaced altogether." Yet Sebald's critical resurrection will likely spark the reader's interest in an author "who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself" and who felt that "he was always writing the same novel, from one prose work to the next--a novel which, he says, one could describe as 'a much chopped-up or disremembered Book of Myself.' " (Walter Benjamin remarked that the characters in Walser's fiction came "from insanity and nowhere else.") Contemplating the work of others, Sebald writes from a writer's rather than a reader's perspective, of one who shares the affliction, who recognizes that, as he writes of painter Jan Peter Tripp, "beneath the surface of illusion there lurks a terrifying abyss. It is, so to speak, the metaphysical underside of reality, its dark inner lining." This last word from the novelist provides a nice footnote on his own writing.

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July 1, 2011

The last big work by the renowned author of Austerlitz to be translated into English, this book studies the interrelationship of place, memory, and creativity by investigating six important influences on Sebald's life: Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gottfried Keller, Eduard Morike, Robert Walser, and the painter Jan Peter Tripp. By talking about them, he reveals more of himself and how he came to be a prize-winning author. An important testament.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2013
Few writers have traveled as quickly from obscurity to the sort of renown that yields an adjective as quickly as German writer W. G. Sebald (19442001), and now Sebaldian is as evocative as Kafkaesque. Sebald is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously refract and magnify meaning. This posthumous collection, a boon to Sebald admirers, is a series of tributes to writers and artists Sebald admired and felt affinity with. Though these pieces resemble literary criticism, they are a species of homage: reverential but without hyperbole. Except for Rousseau, few of Sebald's subjects are well known, but readers will feel enlightened and will newly appreciate the depths of respect writers have for their peers, even if those peers lived two centuries ago. All of Sebald's subjects had uneasy relations with their times and with themselves: Exile, as Gottfried Keller describes it, is a form of purgatory located just outside the world. One does not have to leave home to feel bereft, and Sebald was the great contemporary master of this liminal territory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014

Until his unexpected death at age 57, German-born Sebald (1944-2001) was touted as a potential Nobelist for his meticulous meditations on memory and decay, presented in the guise of fiction (The Rings of Saturn; The Emigrants). He was honored with multiple awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Berlin Literature Prize. This is Sebald's last major work to appear in English and contains essays on five German and Swiss writers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Peter Hebel, Gottfried Keller, Eduard Morike, and Robert Walser, and one painter, Jan Peter Tripp. Composed mainly in 1997, these essays explore familiar themes in Sebald's creations--the writer's isolation, the fading of memory, and the painstaking attention to the details in writing. His observation about Rousseau--for him, composition became "a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act"--seems almost to describe Sebald himself. These are not straightforward essays of explication or tribute. Rather, they insinuate an appreciation of the author under discussion into the reader's mind. Rousseau aside, these writers may not be household names, but Sebald's subtle dissection of them illuminates the writer's trade, as plied until his premature death, by one of its more elusive practitioners. VERDICT Given the subject matter of this collection, its audience is limited, but these essays are well worth reading.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.