W.G. Sebald

With the exception of A Natural History of Destruction, I've now read all of W.G. Sebald's published work, including, most recently, A Place in the Country, which appeared for the first time in English in 2013. 

There aren't many authors for whom I feel such profound admiration as I do Sebald. In fact, I'm not certain there any authors, actually, who occupy a position similar to his on my informal pantheon of thinkers. (John Berger, maybe.)

Part of what I find so indelible about Sebald - and this is clear in A Place in the Country - is the extent to which he reimagined established genre. History, fiction, criticism: all of them are rewritten, resulting in a new sort of literary enterprise, one straddling the line between the real and the imagined, the minute and the expansive. Even in his essays, Sebald charted a new course: his exploration of Rousseau, for instance, is an eery mixture of eulogy, travelogue, and biography. That essay, especially, stands out among those in A Place in the Country, which highlights Sebald's command of Europe, its history, its ethos. 

And then, there's the degree to which Sebald - as that master of middle Europe - successfully cast himself through Jewish eyes. His ability to record the experience of European Jews has always been, for me, among his crowning achievements, and Austerlitz is the most striking example of this transference. There are few novels, indeed, that get at the ideas of dislocation and trauma in much the same way.

That dislocation is amplified - in both Sebald's fiction and criticism - by a very particular use of imagery, one which reinforces the idea of lost time, of the tangible looking back at us, recording our presence, our passing. On the artist Jan Peter Tripp, Sebald writes of the "book of our history lying open before us." The objects we leave behind "bear their experience of us within them." This is why, in some places in Europe, history has overwhelmed the present, calling into question the ability of these places to start again, to relinquish all of those objects and all of their tortured associations. 

Ultimately, for Sebald, developing a character - whether real or imagined - required an exploration of imagery, of place, of things. These could be suitcases or letters; or, they could be foot prints in the snow, preserved via photographs. But that's the magic of Sebald: he walks those faded paths again, and in so doing, conjures the past, bringing it, if only for a moment, closer to the present.  

A Place in the Country was one of those books, rather like Austerlitz, that I did not want to end. But then, that must be one of Sebald's theses: history never ends; it lurks.