Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G. Sebald

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

When German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre it was just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, award-winning translator and author Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the writer, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation. With contributions from poet, essayist, and translator Charles Simic, New Republic editor Ruth Franklin, Bookworm radio host Michael Silverblatt, and more, The Emergence of Memory offers Sebald’s own voice in interviews between 1997 up to a month before his death in 2001. Also included are cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald’s books, thematically linked to events in the contributors’ own lives.Contributors include Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Essays, Biography, Philosophy, Biography Memoir, Writing

176 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Lynne Sharon Schwartz (b. 1939) is a celebrated author of novels, poems, short fiction, and criticism. Schwartz began her career with a series of short stories before publishing her first novel, the National Book Award–nominated Rough Strife (1980). She went on to publish works of memoir, poetry, and translation. Her other novels have included the award-nominated Leaving Brooklyn (1989) and Disturbances in the Field (1983). Her short fiction has appeared in theBest American Short Stories annual anthology series several times. In addition, her reviews and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Schwartz lives in New York City, and is currently a faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Reviews

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

119th book of 2022.

4.5. Fantastic stuff, but I have a great bias towards Sebald. I often, somewhat flippantly, say the beginning of the last century belonged to Joyce, the latter half, to Sebald. Sometimes when I am writing my own things, on those common days of literary abandonment that ironically Sebald himself knew so well, I think, What is the point when there was already a man so good? I lack Hemingway's bravado, when he said something along the lines of, 'You have to read the Greats, so you know who to beat.' If I can, I read anything that involves Sebald in one way or another, even if something is called 'Sebaldian', I jump at it. Inside this slim volume you'll find transcripts from interviews with him as well as essays concerning him. One of the transcripts from an interview by Carole Angier, writer of Sebald's first biography, which was published last year (and worth a read). This interview dates from the late 90s, so Angier's obsession with the man has only grown with time. Another is the 2001 interview with Silverblatt, an interview I've listened to more times than I can count. For one, it is an excellent interview. For another, the interview took place 8 days before Sebald's death, and has the haunting unknowingly-close-to-death power.

If you've read Angier's biography, Speak Silence, then her interview only touches upon a few things she later explodes into greater detail. It begins her unpacking of Sebald's genre and his 'truth'. In one segment she asks, who Max Ferber, from The Emigrants is based on. Sebald replies,

Ferber is actually based on two people. One is my Manchester landlord, D. The story of Ferber's escape from Munich in 1939 at the age of fifteen, and of what subsequently happened to his parents is D's. The second model is a well-known artist.

Angier then asks, '"Which of the two, then [...] is in the photo of Ferber as a boy?'" And 'He smiles, a combination of the ironic and the open, and says, "Neither."' Sebald later says to Angier that one of the entries from his great-uncle's diary, from the same book, is a 'falsification', Sebald wrote it himself. But, he says,

'What matters is all true. The big events - the schoolteacher putting his head on the railway line, for instance - you might think they were made up for dramatic effect. But on the contrary, they are all real. The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l'effet du réel.'

The other essays provide more glimpses into Sebald's writing world. My adoration of him comes from his sentences, his dark almost invisible wit, his staggering control and command over his narratives... I think when you read Sebald, even if you don't enjoy him, you must feel awe. I recently read The Rings of Saturn again and on reaching the final page, again, I just felt as if I wanted to turn back to the first. You say to yourself, 'How does he do it?' There is something reserved about the whole ordeal, something poetic, pretentious, sometimes, yes, boring, other times infuriating, but all his books just beg to be read over and over. There is something irresistible about them. In a sick way I loved to read about his own struggles writing, sometimes it is hard to imagine his books being difficult to him.

That's the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That's the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it's because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer's block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that's going to come out ['Austerlitz']. I don't know how many months I couldn't get . . . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it's all right; you look at it the next day, it's awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of the page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that's how it is. And it's very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one's nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

One of the saddest things in all the interview however were his allusions to the 'next' one: 'The Emigrants was more difficult than this, and the last one I could hardly do, so I dread to think what the next one will be like. [Audience laughter.]' Of course, he never wrote another, dying in 2001. Another essay sheds a glimpse of light: 'At the time of his death, Sebald was researching a book that would explore, among other subjects, his family history.' Some of the final lines of the last essay throw a number of adjectives, all of them questioningly applicable to Sebald himself, and his work, disconsolate, bitter, dark, theatrical, dour, inconsolable . . . He was a rare talent.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introductory essay by Lynne Sharon Schwartz is tightly written and insightful from beginning to end. This raises hopes for the rest of the book. However, I found the first short essay, "The Hunter" by Tim Parks, to be a little too brief to be pleasurable; it may simply require rereading. What follows is a fantastic interview with Sebald by Eleanor Wachtel, titled "The Ghost." Here we get a behind the scenes view of The Emigrants, Sebald's second novel. All the characters in The Emigrants actually existed and led the lives depicted; and 90% of the photos have a genuine connection with the narratives. While there is perhaps an interesting obliquity or ellipticality to the subsequent interview, "Who Is W.G. Sebald" by Carole Angier, I found Angier's penchant for pseudo high-style reflections instead of straightforward questions most annoying. We lose all sense of a shared conversation, inferences we might have drawn had she retained the Q & A format are lost. This is my least favorite interview in the book. Yet despite Angier's failed attempts at style, we do discover which bits are fiction in his novels and which aren't. The characters and their fates, for instance, are real. But some details, such Ambrose Adelwarth's photographed diary, is a fiction. Sebald wrote it himself; though a diary by Adelwarth in multiple languages did exist, it's not clear that Sebald ever had access to it. Such invention, he says, is limited "most of the time" to the level of minor detail as a means of providing "l'effect du réel." The fourth piece is Michael Silverblatt's interview with Sebald, "A Poem of an Invisible Subject," and it's a corker. Silverblatt's knowledge of Sebald's novels seems exhaustive. The interviewer's questions are so pointed that one finds oneself laughing out loud at times when all Sebald can reply to each is "yes" "yes" "yes" before going on to expatiate on his interlocutor's idea. Silverblatt is on top of everything, whether it be matters of structure, metaphor, voice, influences, what have you. It is also in Silverblatt's interview that we first learn of some of Sebald's models. These include the nineteenth century writers Adelbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller, whose "hypotactical syntax" Sebald says he found so useful. The point is also made here by Sebald that non-German speaking critics, because they know so little about German writing of the last two centuries, tend to attribute to him innovations he has adopted from others rather than originated. The "hypotactical syntax" of Stifter and Keller is a prominent example. The work of Thomas Bernhard, who was apparently of enormous importance to Sebald, is another. I must confess that I knew nothing about any of these connections before reading Ms. Schwartz's wonderful book. And it is for these discoveries alone that I am enormously grateful to her. The following interview by Joseph Cuomo takes the prize for revealing Sebald at his quirkiest. In none of the foregoing pieces do we get such a strong sense how literature has emerged from Sebald's life. The connection, it turns out, is very direct. He is a big believer, if I can use that word, in coincidence. What you and I might consider to be random coincidence--for instance, we have the same birthday--is for Sebald, if he likes you, an event of "major significance." He is also at his funniest here. The interview, which was held before a live audience, is regularly interrupted with the bracketed words "audience laughter." Ruth Franklin's essay "Rings of Smoke" follows, the first half of which seems a good but insight-free review of the novels and some of their themes and techniques. I found this first half lackluster. Perhaps because I know the novels so well. It's when Ms. Franklin moves onto an assessment of the book-length poem After Nature and Sebald's only nonfiction book, On The Natural History of Destruction that the essay really becomes compelling.

Essential for Sebald's admirers and critics.

[Kaggelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Οι θαυμαστές του W.G. Sebald θα ενθουσιαστούν και θα αγαπήσουν αυτό το βιβλίο. (Σ΄αυτούς συμπεριλαμβάνομαι κι εγώ).

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

The Emergence of Memory was unexpectedly impactful. The droning introduction led me to think otherwise. The interviews afforded another nuanced layer to appreciate regarding Sebald's marvelous meandering books. There was such care involved to make the genre-bending books appear haphazard. I agree with most of the essayists that even in translation the prose is something from the 19C emerging in horror to survey the damage unleashed. Sebald remained ever artful, allowing us to consider train stations and opera houses while insuring we didn't forget the human cost of colonialism and social engineering practices might originate in lieu of parasitic populations. These engineers of human souls were unable to grasp that life couldn't be parsed and that error abounded. Where else could Sebald plumb but in dusty archives where millenarianism is but another subject in someone's discarded index?

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

'(WSG) You know, there is in Virginia Woolf—description of a moth coming to its end on a window-pane somewhere in Sussex—There's no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got away, and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.'

If you like Sebald—Why would you not?

'Much of modern life repelled Sebald. He told me that one of the chief reasons he departed Germany, first for French-speaking Switzerland, then for England, was that he "found it agreeable not to hear current German spoken all around me." His literary models wrote in nineteenth- century German - Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Paul Richter. "The contemporary language is usually hideous, but in German it's especially nauseating," he said. He asked me if I knew the German word for "mobile phone." With a look of horror, he told me: a handi.'

'(WGS)—I think the best sections in Dostoyevsky's writings are those which are metaphysical rather than religious. And metaphysics is something that's always interested me, in the sense that one wants to speculate about these areas that are beyond one's ken, as it were. I've always thought it very regrettable and, in a sense, also foolish, that the philosophers decided somewhere in the nineteenth century that metaphysics wasn't a respectable discipline and had to be thrown overboard, and reduced themselves to becoming logicians and statisticians. It seemed a very poor diet, somehow, to me.

So metaphysics, I think, is a legitimate concern. Writers like Kafka, for instance, are interested in metaphysics. If you read a story like Investigations of a Dog: And Other Creatures it has a subject whose epistemological horizon is very low. He doesn't realize anything above the height of one foot. He makes incantations so that the bread comes down from the dinner table. How it comes down, he doesn't know. But he knows that if he performs certain rites, then certain events will follow. And then he goes, this dog, through the most extravagant speculations about reality, which we know is quite different. As he, the dog, has this limited capacity of understanding, so do we. And so it's quite legitimate to ask - and of course it can become a parlor game, as it did in Bloomsbury these philosophers said, "Are we sure that we're really sitting here at this table?"'

'(WSG) I hardly knew any English at all when I came to Britain, and I am not a very talented linguist. I still have quite bad days even now, when I feel that I am a barbaric stutterer. But that's not the main reason. I am attached to that language. And there's a further dimension, I think. If you have grown up in the kind of environment I grew up in, you can't put it aside just like that.'

'(WSG) And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it's practically impossible to do this; to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible. So you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something on your mind but that you do not necessarily roll out, you know, on every other page. The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience, that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly addressed. I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we've all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.'

'I do not know whether Sebald despaired over his own complex patterns; but he recognized himself that the patterning and layering in his books closely resembles the Penelope-like embroidering and unraveling of the weavers who reappear throughout his pages. His material is memory, not thread, but the result is the same: a work of art that vanishes almost as soon as it appears, undone by the opposing forces that it seeks to mesh. And so Sebald's struggle against oblivion ends ironically in evanescence. The art that he created is of near miraculous beauty, but it is as fragile, and as ephemeral, as a pearl of smoke.'

[Stratos Maragos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ο ξαφνικός θάνατος του Sebald σε τροχαίο δημιούργησε ακόμα μεγαλύτερο ενδιαφέρον για το έργο του. Ταύτοχρονα ανέκοψε μια δυναμική συγγραφική πορεία που ίσως δεν είχε δώσει το μέγιστο των δυνατοτήτων της.

Αυτό το έξτρα υλικό, από μακροσκελής συνεντεύξεις του Sebald αλλά και δοκίμια που αφορούν το έργο του, φωτίζει περισσότερο την προσωπικότητα του, τις προθέσεις του, τις εμμονές του αλλά και το ιδιότυπο πεζογραφικό αφηγηματικό έργο του που συνοδεύεται συχνά από ζοφερές ασπρόμαυρες φωτογραφίες-τεκμήρια, συντρίμμια αλλά και θραύσματα από το παρελθόν.

Ως περιπλανώμενος φωτογράφος ο ίδιος, νιώθω πολλές φορές να παρασύρομαι με τους στοχασμούς και την ευαισθησία του. Η πανοραμική οπτική του με γοητεύει. Μαγνητίζομαι από τις ιστορίες αποσύνθεσης και εντροπίας σε αυτήν την πεζογραφική φόρμα ανάμεσα στην μυθοπλασία και τον δοκιμιακό λόγο.

[Stefania · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Μιλώντας με εξελικτικούς όρους , ένα χαρακτηριστικό γνώρισμα του ανθρώπινου είδους είναι ότι αποτελεί είδος σε απόγνωση, για διάφορους λόγους. Επειδή έχουμε δημιουργήσει ένα περιβάλλον για να ζούμε το οποίο δεν είναι όπως θα έπρεπε. Και επειδή είμαστε διαρκώς πέραν των ορίων μας. Ζούμε ακριβώς στο όριο ανάμεσα στον φυσικό κόσμο από τον οποίο αποκοπήκαμε, ή έστω αποκοβόμαστε, και σε εκείνο τον άλλο κόσμο που δημιούργησαν τα εγκεφαλικά μας κύτταρα. Και αυτό το διαχωριστικό όριο,το τεκτονικό ρήγμα,διατρέχει τόσο καθαρά τη σωματική και συναισθηματική μας υπόσταση. Έτσι λοιπόν η πηγή του πόνου μας πιθανώς να εδράζεται στις συγκρούσεις των τεκτονικών πλακών μεταξύ τους. Η μνήμη είναι ένα από αυτά τα φιανόμενα."

[Madhuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sebald's voice is unmistakable in all his works. All his narrators, the reliable and unreliable ones, speak in his voice. The characters narrated by those narrators speak in his voice. To me, these works are as intimate as you could get with him. And yet, somehow these conversations have been able to achieve a slightly higher degree of intimacy, and I think most of its due to the understanding between the two people conversing.

the emergence of memory is an anthology which was published after Sebald's death. It is a collection of five conversations and four articles/essays which have previously appeared in various publications. They make a good collection, particularly the conversations, tied together by Lynne Schwartz's introduction which touches upon each of Sebald's works available in English, a little bit on his life, and his fascination for death and destruction. Some of the recurrent motifs in Sebald's works are explored here, and the editor has explained that some of these interviews/essays have been chosen to emphasize those motifs, but also to bring forth facets of all of Sebald's works. She also excuses herself for selecting Michael Hoffmann's essay on Sebald as 'one dissenting voice' as a 'skeptical corrective to what otherwise might be a gush of nearly unqualified enthusiasm.'

The two best conversations from this collection are 'Who is WG Sebald?' with Carole Angier which originally appeared in the Jewish Quarterly in 1997, and 'A poem of an invisible subject' with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW which was originally a voice broadcast in 2001. In his conversation with Carole Angier, Sebald talks primarily about Emigrants, but also somewhat of his disappointments with growing up in Germany, about being shown a film about concentration camps, but hurriedly, without explanations. Carole Angier seems to say little during the conversation, but offers some of her perceptions as she recollects the interview (He can tell me this. I think, because his mother will never read the Jeweish Quarterly). She tries to understand the stories of the real people behind the Emigrants, and whether Sebald felt any discomfort in changing the stories of his models. Sebald evades answering this, and his discomfort becomes evident in this evasion. He has mentioned in a few places his unease with 'the questionable business of writing'.
Silverblatt's conversation has already been much discussed and praised for its perceptiveness. It is very perceptive ofcourse, and probes Sebald on his writing influences. The influence of 19th century German prose, or Thomas Bernhard. But this interview also brings out in the open the fact that Sebald kept circling the theme of holocaust without dealing with it directly in the prose. Sebald agreed:

I've always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of vilification of minorities, the attempt, well nigh achieved, to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that its practically impossible to do this; to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible. So you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something on your mind but that you do not necessarily roll out on every other page.
....there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific.

In the conversation with Joseph Cuomo, Sebald discusses lot more about writing, about the conflict between conjuring lies and giving liberty to imagination. It is a must-read to understand some of his conflicts. Sebald has been most expansive here. Some of the excerpts of this interview can be found online.
Amongst the essays, there is only Ruth Franklin's Rings of Smoke worth talking of. She has discussed each of Sebald's work, sieving through them, quoting the most essentials parts of them and connecting them together. And despite her enthusiasm for Sebald, she offers a counterpoint to his essays in On the natural history of destruction.
I do not even want to credit Michael Hoffmann's essay - it is an insult to counter-balance. There is unabashed criticism, but no critique and the reasons for his dissatisfaction in Sebald are altogether unclear.
Overall a good collection, though i think the essays could have been sacrificed for more interviews.

[Rise]

The pieces in The Emergence of Memory reveal important aspects of W. G. Sebald's spectral writings and personality which added to an appreciation of his literary enterprise. His project was centered on elusive, illusory memory and truth and their recovery and representations in art and literature. The greatest essays in the book were those that attempt to describe the nuances of his project, its totality, and its vision. An essay by Tim Parks, for example, tried to define the core of Sebald's vision as "engagement in the present inevitably ... devouring the past."

In interviews Sebald made frequent mentions of the "conspiracy of silence" about German war crimes and war experiences in his household, community, and university. This seemed to be the main thing that his writings were trying to respond to. His temperament was often seen as melancholic, his disposition as pessimist. And yet these views were grounded in a playful mental landscape. His powers of association were an instance of a wandering imagination; his solitary walks and constant agitations were not symptoms of a decadent spirit. He was a loner engaged in the natural state of his natural world. Destruction and ruins and madness were the ashes from which he found words of staggering beauty. Nothing could be more paradoxical than Sebald's finding beauty in destruction.

My double post on this book can be read here and here.

[Gorkem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the title of book promises the reader Conversations with W. G. Sebald, the only half of it is merely about interviews with Sebald. The rest of the books contains reviews and articles written about Sebald.

The reviews and articles provide very beneficial guide for Sebald's reader in order to internalize Sebald's point of view for his books. The most powerful thing of the book is that there are comparisons, which discusses with German interviewers.

The Emergence of Memory : Conversations with W.G.Sebald is also a good book for readers, who want to meet with Sebald style. Therefore, for new readers this book might be very useful. However, if you are familiar with Sebald and want to learn more, this book might be inefficient by means of digging details.

5/4

[Andrew]

On the one hand, Sebald is an absolute literary saint to me. On the other hand, I don't feel like I learned too much new about Sebald in this book. Whatever personal details he discloses are disclosed with the same chilly remove displayed in his novels. The perspectives on the world aren't that different from those likewise espoused in his novels. While I was entertained throughout, this does kind of feel unnecessary, considering the strength and power of his published books.

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE EMERGENCE OF MEMORY (2007) is a set of published interviews and essays on Max Sebald.

A German living in England, Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven. His books reveal his interest in the countless victims of last century's wars and revolutions and in the way in which individual, collective and cultural memory deal on the border of what language can convey. His narrating style, digressive and melancholic, reflect the state of mind of someone set adrift by forces beyond their understanding and control.

Sebald was a writer of genius who wrote with an original and captivating style. He has been compared to Kafka, Borges, Proust, Nabokov, Calvino, Primo Levi and Thomas Bernhard. And yet he is absolutely unique. His devastating books attempt to speak of the unspeakable while they try to make sense of the senseless. This slim collection is the perfect introduction to this superb writer.

[Paul Toth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, married only by the inclusion of two Sebald detractors, whose points have already been addressed by anyone who reads his work and asks the same questions. Such reviewers want what they expect, to be "taught" what they know, thus confirming themselves to themselves. Sebald comes across just as one would expect, curious and mapless, a wanderer, a thinker whose thoughts never devolve into academia but instead circle above life, which keeps moving out of sight. He cannot grasp it; that is his point. Better to read the novels themselves first, at least one or two. If you like what you read, then you'll want to read this. If you don't, then you won't need to read the two essays that would only confirm what you already think.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of interviews and essays focused on W.G. Sebald is just fine as far as it goes...or can go, given Sebald's elusive approach to literature. Having read a number of his books, I was curious as to what I would discover about the man. Not surprisingly, he was an elusive fellow as a person, too.

For three decades he taught European literature in the U.K., having moved there because he could not bear living in a Germany where people simply did not discuss the Holocaust. They slipped past it, sidestepped it, didn't bring it up. And Sebold found that foul.

Eventually he added writing to his occupation as a teacher and would assemble his works out of archival research, personal meditation, photo albums, and an affinity for the elegance of 19th century writers. One essayist in this collection, Michael Hoffman, found him to be a colossal, aimless bore. I tend to think Sebald might agree with him. A long time ago I knew a writer named Juan Benet in Spain. He said his novels were incredibly boring, and he was right. But Benet, like Sebold, was a highly esteemed literary man nonetheless.

The other essayists fawn over Sebold. They adore the indeterminacy of his writing, the melancholy, the curious details and digressions, and his careful, unemotional style (except for the melancholy, of course.) What the devil were these books of his? he was asked. He said they were prose narratives, comprising fact, fiction, and very little in the way of narrative architecture, i.e., clear plots, rounded characters, a rise and fall in the action. Action? These essayists like the fact there is next to no action in a Sebald book, and no explanation for why the "narrator" wrote them. They are as formless as the printed page will allow them to be, but they are beguiling in their mystery.

Sebold's "subject" in many ways is memory, a great theme of the last thirty years. Memory is what isn't documented, isn't wrangled into shape with "meaning," what melts much like ice no matter how much sawdust you cover it in, and is, of course, elusive, a guess, often wrong. When Sebold is writing about Kafka, is he really writing about Kafka? I wouldn't think so. Is he "borrowing" Kafka? Sort of, but not to the extent that he is forced to deal with some unpleasant fact associated with Kafka. No, no, no, Sebold wants nothing to do with life barging into his books. On the other hand, he is just fine with Nabokov traipsing through one of his books no less than four times with no explanation why.

I think the way Hoffman attacks Sebold works better than the other pieces that praise him, although I don't really agree with Hoffman. Essayists who praise Sebold are too cowed and mystified by him. They guess a lot. They often refer to Proust when they write about Sebold, primarily because of their common interest in the theme of memory. But Sebold has no interest in fascinating characters struggling for a footing in society. His narrator, unlike Proust's Marcel, is quite peripheral and much more neutral. And decisively, Marcel knows exactly what he means by memory. He has it by the tail. Sebold doesn't want that to happen, He would rather drop a black and white photo in the text and make you ask, What the hell is that doing there?

If you are interested in Sebold, this is something you might like reading. If you are not interested, don't bother.

[Petros Karamootees · Rating 4 out of 5]

Πολυ ενδιαφέρον 📔 το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο με την προϋπόθεση ότι έχεις διαβάσει τα έργα του Ζέμπαλντ.

[Colleen Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably like many people I learned about WG Sebald just weeks before he died in an automobile accident in Dec. 2001. The English translation of "Austerlitz" had just been published. Partly because he was born in Germany, in a small Alpine village, in 1944 and because I had lived in Munich myself when I was 12 I've had an interest in German and Germany ever since. I have all of Sebald's books and most of them in German as well as in English. Because he's such an interesting and unusual writer when I saw this book in my local bookstore I bought it immediately and read it at once. Now I'm going to re-read his books. A further personal connection is that the first book he wrote, although it wasn't published in English until 2002, after he died, is "After Nature" about the Isenheim Alterpiece in Colmar, Alsace (now France)created about 1510. It's a multipaneled piece in brilliant colors and almost surrealistic in style. I saw the art before I read the book. This kind of coincidence appears often in his writing.

In any case, this book of interviews with Sebald and reviews of his books is fascinating.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zie ook: http://hetminstegeringste.blogspot.be...

The emergence of memory. Conversations with W.G. Sebald, samengesteld en ingeleid door Lynne Sharon Schwartz, bundelt vier essays en opiniestukken en vijf gesprekken*, waarin de auteurs en interviewers lichtelijk idolaat, maar voldoende kritisch, dieper trachten door te dringen tot de mens en de schrijver Sebald, zijn schrijverschap en de obsessieve motieven en thema’s die hij in een zeer kenmerkende stijl als een web over zijn enigmatische en in alle opzichten grensoverschrijdende oeuvre heeft gespannen. Het initiatief van Schwartz om deze stukken samen te brengen, mag in de eerste plaats gerust opgevat worden als een ode aan de veel te vroeg aan ons ontglipte schrijver die als uit het niets en haast onverklaarbaar op het voorplan van de wereldliteratuur is getreden. Het boek legt bovenal een doorvoelde getuigenis af van de blijvende impact van Sebald op collega-literatoren en op zijn lezers: “…he had become, as if by stealth, an indispensable writer, one we could not afford to lose. More than anyone else writing today, he made it new.” (Schwartz, p. 9).

Een analytisch antwoord ten gronde op de vraag waarom velen zo ontvankelijk zijn voor en in de ban geraken van Sebald’s nauwelijks te classificeren poëtische prose narratives, blijft achterwege. De bijdragen pretenderen geen doorwrochte (literatuur)wetenschappelijke verklaringen te bieden voor een succes dat het resultaat lijkt te zijn van een dieperliggend en collectief maatschappelijk fenomeen, waarop hier en daar wel kort gealludeerd wordt.
Schwartz vat het als volgt samen (p. 9): “His undulating, hypnotic sentences (despite their antique cast) are paradigms of the modern sensibility, its tangled restlessness as well as its torpor. His dreamlike narratives, meandering, yet meticulous, echo the lingering state of shock that is our legacy…”. Meer specifiek schrijft Tim Parks in het essay ‘The Hunter’, dat ingaat op Duizelingen (p. 35): "Here is the author in a railway carriage with two beautiful women; knowing what we know of him, any approach to them is impossible, yet how attractive they are in their mistery! … Only Sebald, one suspects, would study an out-of-date phrase book while missing the chance to speak to two attractive ladies. The determinedly old-fashioned aura that hangs about all his prose is part and parcel of his decidedly modern version of non-engagement.”
Die moderne ervaring kan misschien nog het best vestaan worden als dat wat Jan Pollen beweert over Teju Cole, wiens quasi plotloze en meanderende Open Stad verwantschap vertoont met Sebald en die zich daarin steeds vanop een afstand “nergens expliciet uit[spreekt], maar je voelt onder elke regel de trage draaibeweging van de geest richting een nieuw levensgevoel. Teju Cole zet een (onderbouwde) stap naar betrokkenheid, engagement en een vrije integratie in een globaal systeem dat zich elke dag, elk uur herdefinieert, bijstuurt, afbreekt en herstelt.”?** Cole doet dit naar mijn gevoel echter met een beperktere literaire zeggingskracht en voorlopig worstel ik nog steeds met de wel zeer inepte afstandelijke houding van de protagonist Julius - in de ogen van sommige andere lezers is hij ronduit een sociopaat!?

Alleszins, zo erkennen de auteurs, aan Sebald’s onbestemde spectrale stem ligt evenzeer een uitgesproken emotionele betrokkenheid ten grondslag die ook de lezer niet ‘passief’ en onbewogen kàn laten. Het is die paradox of, in toenemende mate van gestrengheid, die ambivalentie, die contradictie, die in alle bijdragen in de bundel in meerdere of mindere mate, en in de interviews rechtstreeks aan Sebald aan de orde wordt gesteld, maar dan specifiek toegespitst op zijn oeuvre en de diverse facetten daarin. Omdat in drie van de essays (Simic, Parks, Franklin) verbanden worden gelegd tussen Sebald’s thema’s en persoonlijke gebeurtenissen uit het leven van de auteurs, leveren zij een extra dimensie aan deze problematiek en dringen zij op die manier het diepst door tot de kern van Sebald's werken.
In ‘Rings of Smoke’ besluit Ruth Franklin haar bijdrage met een zeer beklijvende getuigenis. Op de laatste pagina’s van De Emigrés beschrijft de verteller een foto die genomen werd in het ghetto van Lodz, met daarop drie vrouwen van rond de twintig achter een weefraam. Franklin zegt hierover (p. 142): “I am strangely moved by this passage each time I read it, because the young woman in the photograph could have been my own grandmother, who was blonde and whose family owned a textile factory in Lodz. I imagine her behind a loom, spinning out my own fate: to pace the same ground over and over, looking for the source of the shadow that still darkens my world. Yet such a connection is dangerous, because it illustrates the illusory workings of art against memory. … I do not know what she looked like as a young women, but imagining her behind Sebald’s loom … merely substitutes an artistic image for a blank space. The blankness, however, is closer to the truth.”
Tenslotte eindigt Franklin met een verwijzing naar De Ringen van Saturnus (p. 143): "I do not know whether Sebald despaired over his own complex patterns; but he recognized himself that the patterning and layering in his books closely resembles the Penelope-like embroidering and unraveling of the weavers who reappear throughout his pages. His material is history, not thread, but the result is the same: a work of art that vanishes almost as soon as it appears, undone by the opposing forces that is seeks to mesh. And so Sebald's struggle against oblivion ends ironically in evanescense. The art that he created is of near miraculous beauty, but it is as fragile, and as ephemeral, as a pearl of smoke."
We mogen echter concluderen dat Sebald die vertwijfeling wel degelijk kende, er een omgang mee zocht en daarin zeer scrupuleus was. Hij getuigt op onnavolgbare wijze met al zijn paradoxen in de eerste plaats van onze kwetsbaarheid, houdt ons enkele ‘blind geworden spiegels’ voor en legt daarmee de vinger op de wonde die onze moderne conditie is.

Deze bundel is vrij toegankelijk en een absolute aanrader voor al diegenen die, zoals ik, op zoek zijn naar woorden die trachten uit drukken ‘wat’ Sebald lezen met je doet. Er is verschrikkelijk veel dat ik hier onvermeld moest laten, het mijmeren (piekeren dus) begon als vanzelf, want het ‘waarom’ je voelt wat Sebald met je doet, kom je niet te weten, misschien in een ander boek, maar meer dan waarschijnlijk wellicht nooit?


Noten:

*In de interviews is W.G. Sebald (Max!) zeer nabij, je kan hem zelfs nog horen, hij is met jou in gesprek. Het interview van Michael Silverblatt (p. 77-86) kan je hier beluisteren: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSFcTW..., het werd opgenomen een maand voor het tragische ongeluk.

**zie voor Pollen: http://www.dereactor.org/home/detail/...

[Asa Waters · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating selection of essays, interviews, and criticism of W.G. Sebald, a hermetic German-English writer who tragically passed just a few years after finding his creative voice. Sebald’s enigmatic prose has captivated my mind ever since I read The Rings of Saturn, a meandering and elegantly written novel which, like all of his works, defies our conventional understanding of genre. Like a weaver at his loom, Sebald threads together historical anecdotes with his own memoirist musings detailing a walking trip through southern England. Upon finishing The Rings of Saturn, I had an insatiable desire to read through the rest of Sebald’s catalogue. Although always the central figure of his narratives, Sebald rarely revealed himself to the reader, acting instead as a mediator for the stories of others. So, when I found this little book tucked away on a dusty shelf in a D.C. bookstore, I knew I had to have it, as it promised a deeper and more intimate understanding of the man behind this incomparable books. For the most part, it delivered. With insightful interviews and carefully constructed essays, this collection offers fans of Sebald a glimpse into his literary influences, personal convictions and tedious writing process.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insightful gathering of essays and interviews.

[Richard Cho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compilation of essays on and interview with the great German writer W.G. Sebald.
I liked the eclectic mix of criticism, and the selection is unbiased as well: most are profuse praise but there was one guarded, somewhat negative nitpicking as well.
As I know that I'll read Sebald over and over again until I die, this is a good supplementary book to have and go back to from time to time.

------------------------------------------------
Quotes:

...Austerlitz is typically meditative, digressive, undramatic, and shuns the techniques of the realistic novel (13).

But in our collective amnesia, we erase time as we go, forgetting what defines us. He has not forgotten; he pieces together the shards to remind us (14).

Sebald's books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage (14).

...critics have puzzled over what to call his works, with their melange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on painting, entomology, architecture... (16). - prose narratives

Toward the end of his story, Austerlitz gives the narrator the key to his apartment, passing on his life for safekeeping. The novel is the key Sebald passes on to us (17).

In the essay on the work of Peter Weiss, "the artistic self engages personally in... a reconstruction, pledging itself... to set up a memorial, and the painful nature of that process could be said to ensure the continuance of memory" (17).

...that insistence on probing "the traces of decay" (18).

... of his country's "collective amnesia."

...give documentary evidence of experiences... (24).

His writing: most evocative, haunting, and understated way. (archival)

"...as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them..." (39)
And photographs are for me, as it were, one of the emanations of the dead, especially these older photographs of people no longer with us" (40)
...to legitimize the story that he tells...arresting time. Why these authors are using photo - Luiselli as well - a piece of investigative journalism?

hypotactical syntax (78)

Moving around, peregrination. Walking about, drawing mental maps. ...the tradition of the walker (traveler).

Ghosts, echos

[Austerlitz] is much more in the form of an elegy, really, a long prose elegy (103) - Luiselli as well. The title of the fictional book.

Though Austerlitz was largely taken as a novel, Sebald himself refused to designate it as such; in an interview he called it "a prose book of indefinite form." Indeed, why must the passage above be anything other than notes from an idiosyncratic travel journal? The street names, improbable though they may be, are easily verified with a map of Antwerp, and the zoo, located near the central train station just as he says, does in fact have a Nocturama (123).

Art is the preserver of memory, but it is also the destroyer of memory: this is the final tug-of-war in Sebald's work and the most fundamental one. As he searches for patterns in the constellation of grief that his books record, he runs the risk that the patterns themselves, by virtue of their very beauty, will extinguish the grief that they seek to contain. Sebald's peculiar alchemy of aestheticism and sorrow unwittingly underscores its own insubstantiality. Even as he investigates the roots of memory, Sebald, like the weavers whom he finds so emblematic, continually unravels his own creations (126).

...because the question concerns the responsibility of writers to respond to incidents in their culture, not the responsibility of the average citizen to open his eyes when confronted with the ugliness of humanity (136).

The reviewers noted the author's elegiac tone, his grasp of history, his extraordinary powers of observation, and the clarify of his writing (145).

...all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one." - Walter Benjamin -

Austerlitz: "It's all related through this narrative figure. It's as he remembers, so it's in his cast." (170)
















On Bernhard by Sebald:
What Thomas Bernhard did to postwar fiction writing in the German language was to bring to it a new radicality which didn't exist before, which wasn't comp

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, this book is the only read which I've felt an unrelenting need/desire to write a review for. Though I fear the title
of "review" sounds too scholarly. As a standard, I've always discharged literary criticism as self-absorption and a form
of academic masterbation. However, after reading Sebald's Vertigo, Rings of Saturn, Emigrants and Austerlitz, I couldn't
help but want to have a conversation with their author. Ironically serendipitous, is that the immediate book was published
posthumously. Sebald's works are focused on memory and death. In fact; "it takes one to know one" follows suit
that an insatiable thirst in me welled up after reading each of his novels: themes of memory; forgetting; history; death;
and morality. Sebald's kneading of these themes is unassuming, silent, spectral, and ethereal. While reading the
'reviewed' book, I found myself pressing for a direct (an indirect discussion is prevalent) questioning of whether there
exists, to W.G. Sebald's understanding, a morality of memory. While the topic is, I believe, well covered in a socio-
political context, I can't help but beg for an understanding if the idea of a responsibility, conscientiously or
unconsciously, exists on an individual level; and if so, how self actualization is compatible with the act of
rememberance. I've been through enough psycotherapy to understand that the human mind uses/manufactures safety with how
it compartementalizes the process of remembering and recalling. A safety function is to not recall traumatic events.
However, these subconscious memories often lead to 'depressive moods' and in extremes, suicide. Sebald brings to life a
discussion of the weight of remembrance and 'conscience'. Conscience is the most interesting to me in a discussion of
memory as the Oxford Dictionary defines 'conscience' as "moral sense of right and wrong." Though I doubt Sebald would
go so far as my favorite author: Dostoevsky - "conscious is a disease." A semantic lecture of "conscience vs. conscious"
is anticipated. He does touch on the edges by saying "It's the ones who have a conscious that die early, it grinds you
down."
The last interest I take with this book is the begging of the compatibility of 'History' with 'Metaphysics'.
Sebald wants to longingly devote the future to metaphysics, he seeems to be at an intellecutual, or I'll dare say it:
an intellecutal/spiritual impasse. However, he historically notes the trangression/incompatibiilty of history and
metaphysics which I have used to make sense of my own existence. The Russian authors, which I believe, do the best at
illustrating the need for metaphysics in moving forward, however, after Tolstoy, Bulgakhov, and of course Dostoevsky,
who is left to carry the torch? I argue for Calvino, Maugham (in a realist portrayal wich deserves an entire recital
of criticism), and lastly, what I'm currently reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard, "My Struggle". The audacity of that
bastard!

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

W.G. Sebald is one of my favourite writers. I read his novels and was stunned when he died in late 2001 because it meant there wouldn't be any more, so when I came across this book I was keen on learning more about Sebald, and I did. Many of the articles are insightful, as are the interviews with Sebald. I find his life and what compelled him to write fascinating. He was a professor of German literature, but felt trapped in his work. Sebald was driven to make sense of a lacunae he felt in his life. He was born in a small village in Germany shortly after the war, but no one would talk about what had happened. Rather than simply fill in the missing parts, Sebald recreates this sense of longing and seeking to awaken a dormant memory. His writing has a halluncenary quality and is highly evocative. He meanders through unlikely associations. The effect is hypnotic. I'd read this book again.

[Anselm · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's some great stuff in here, particularly in the interviews - and so I'd prefer a book of just interviews. Partially because a book of interviews with a single individual typically makes for its own kind of work, shape, trajectory of mind....in a way that is unique to that form (book of interviews as form) if the interviews are fleshed out enough and not overrun with repetition (requiring work on both sides), and partially because I find the essays herein to be in the way of Sebald's talking voice. The essays, despite their own merits, make this book feel like a half-assed production.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although some of the interview material with Sebald is repetitious in places, this collection expanded my understanding of Sebald the person and Sebald the writer. I especially love Sebald's descriptions of how he protected and nurtured his non-academic writing life from his paycheck-generating academic life. "Because when you do begin to write seriously, then it is very much like an escape route--you find yourself in some kind of compound, your professional life, and you start doing something about which nobody knows. You go into your potting shed."

[Peter Allum · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of critical essays and interview transcripts provides very helpful insights into Sebald and the nature of his work (neither entirely factual, nor fully fiction). Some key themes include: the failure to confront WW2 by his parents and the post-war German leaders/teachers; dislike of modernity; efforts to establish links with past great artists (Kafka, Nabokov, Casanova, etc.). Very valuable to Sebald fans like myself.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally picked this book up again and started it from the beginning. Seemed less dense the second time. I had to finish it in anticipation of possibly the last Sebald book we will have, A Place in the Country. The piece about the last book he was working on hit me hard. I wish I could have that book. I miss him.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice collection of interviews and essays on Sebald, very helpful in understanding his work--about which I remain deeply skeptical. Why, you ask?

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Jack]

Sebald's approach validates my own approach to writing, insofar as I needed validation. It also gives me some new ideas about how to use these techniques

[Hubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful companion to understanding Sebald's writings and world view.

[Brendan Blom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has inspired me to read more Sebald, and re-read The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. Also, nice to find out that Sebald himself wasn't quite as melancholy as his writing.