Rare Film of Sebald To Be Shown in Paris December 1

Sebald scholar, Ruth Vogel-Klein of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, has sent me information on an extraordinary evening that she is organizing devoted to W.G. Sebald. It sounds like an event no one should miss!

The evening will begin with the showing of a nearly unknown documentary film (50 min.) realized by Austrian Television in 1990 (in German, no subtitles).  It shows Sebald’s presentation in Klagenfurt to the jury of the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize.  Sebald was one of numerous presenters hoping to win the prize, which was created to recognize distinguished young writers.  After his lecture, Sebald comments briefly on his story Paul Bereyter from The Emigrants, and then the film shows the discussion of the jury. In despite of some very positive judgments on Sebald’s prose by some members of the jury, other voices won and Sebald was not selected.

The film will be followed by a lecture (in German) by Sebald scholar Sven Meyer of Hamburg, editor of Campo Santo and Über das Land und das Wasser. Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964-2001.

Organization and presentation: Ruth Vogel-Klein, Sebald scholar, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
December 1, 2009
20h/8: 00 p.m.
Maison Heinrich Heine
27c, bd Jourdan
75014 Paris
(RER Cité Universitaire)
Entrance free.
Click here for a map.

Maison Heinrich Heine

Die Ausgewanderten Audiobook

I’m grateful to a Vertigo reader for letting me know that W.G. Sebald’s book Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) is available as a German-language audio book on 7 CDs, published by Winter & Winter.  The reader is Paul Herwig.  It can be ordered directly from their website or from Amazon.de.  It was apparently released in late 2007.

Previously, the Max Ferber section of Die Ausgewanderten was available on  a pair of CDs issued by Eichborn Verlag in 2000, with Sebald himself reading.

New Directions Releases Reading Guides to Sebald

New Directions has put up reading guides to several books from their catalog on Scribd.com, including W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn.  Half expecting to see typical book club questions, I was pleasantly surprised that New Directions has done this rather well.  Other authors include Roberto Bolaño, Yoel Hoffmann, Clarice Lispector, Guilliermo Rosales, Nathaniel West, Osamu Dazai, and César Aira.  Not a bad start.  Scrbd.com conveniently allows downloading into several formats: Word, Acrobatd pdf,Open Office, and plaint text.

So, here’s a sample question from The Rings of Saturn:  How does the structure of the book mirror the structure of the quincunx?

The Past Is a Remote Galaxy

…nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples…

The nameless narrator of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel Senselessness, which has just appeared in an English translation, has been hired by the Catholic Church to edit a manuscript of eyewitness testimonies to massacres that occurred during the civil war of a Central American country much like El Savador.  He immediately plunges us into the nightmarish account of a man who was forced to watch the murder of his family, and I braced myself for for a squeamish read.  But quickly the book veers off and much of the time the narrator is more interested in making sure he gets paid, sipping beers with acquaintances, and trying to get laid.

The first thing I knew about Fatima was that I wanted to lick her all over due to the appetizing creamy texture and light rosy hue of her skin and her perfect curves pressed into a pair of red-denim jeans and an organdy blouse under which could be descried her seductive belly button as well as a little path of fuzz my eyes began to follow, descending, while she talked about her recent trip to a village in the highlands, where years ago half the population had been slaughtered – initiated by the army but with an enthusiasm that left no room for doubt – by the other half, their fellow citizens, one of the 422 massacres contained in the one thousand one hundred pages that awaited me on the bishop’s desk the following day, when I would continue my task of copyediting and correcting and about which I refused to think, wanting only to descend the peach-fuzz path that would carry me from Fatima’s belly button to her fleshy cave…

At one point, upon visiting the well-appointed house rented by a forensic anthropologist, he is even cynical enough to remark “that it was much more profitable to dig up Indians’ bones than to edit pages bearing their testimonies…”

Castellanos Moya’s tumultuous prose reminds me of Roberto Bolaño (with a dash of Thomas Bernhard thrown in for good measure).  His narrator wants “to tell everything…down to the hairs and the smells, spill it all out to a point of satiety, compulsively, in a kind of verbal spasm, as if it were an orgiastic race that would culminate in my total abandon, until I was left without secrets…”  At the same time, Castellanos Moya’s attempt to weave the ghostly presence of the victims of death squads into the present moment cannot help but remind the reader of W.G. Sebald, especially The Emigrants.

Senselessness presents us with a very uncertain moral landscape.  The narrator is little more than an average Joe who is too weak-kneed, self-centered, and paranoid to finish his task properly.  His every attempt to understand the big picture results in delusions and mistaken identities.   He is occasionally haunted by the horrific tales he is editing, but he is more intrigued by brief fragments of text that he notes down and recites like outsider poetry to be admired for their quirky syntax and grammar. Here he rhapsodizes over the phrase For always the dreams they are there still:

a splendid sentence…its sonority, its impeccable structure, which spread itself out into eternity without skipping over the moment, its use of the adverb to wring the neck of time, a sentence spoken in the testimony of an old indigenous woman from who knows what ethnic group…

Presented with an opportunity to come face to face with a woman who provided one of the testimonies in his manuscript the narrator flees.  And in one telling episode, his daily life is more upset by the smelly feet of a woman he tries to bed than with the tales of torture he is editing.

Senselessness is a brilliantly pessimistic book – and a conflicted one, as well.  Castellanos Moya has written the bookabout murdered indigenous peoples that “nobody in his right mind” wants to read, and here I am (along with a few thousand other people) reading it.  But Castellanos Moya seems deeply skeptical about this enterprise.  Whenever his narrator dutifully tries to tell others what he is doing, to somehow share the almost unbearable events from his manuscript, he finds that the past is as distant and uninteresting to others as the history of “a remote galaxy”.

As a German, Sebald believed that it was possible – or at least morally necessary – to try to achieve some kind of restitution through a willful act of the imagination.  Castellanos Moya doesn’t provide us with any such hope.  He seems to suggest that any such attempt is doomed from the outset to be simply irrelevant.

If anything, Senselessness goes even further by hinting that everyone has the seed of a murderer buried deep within.  At one point, the narrator momentarily becomes transfigured into a military officer whose death squad is in the midst of a killing spree.

I returned to the hut of those fucking Indians who would understand the hell that awaited them only when they saw flying through the air the baby I held by the ankles so I could smash its head of tender flesh against the wood beam.  And it was the splatter of palpitating brains that brought me back to my senses: I found myself in the middle of the room, sweating, a little dizzy because of the vertiginous movements of swinging the baby over my head, but at the same time with a feeling of lightness, as if I had taken a load off my back, as if my transformation into the lieutenant who exploded the heads of newborn babies against beams had been a catharsis, freeing me from the pain accumulated in the one thousand one hundred pages…

Yet in the end, Castellanos Moya makes it perfectly clear who, repeatedly, are the victors.

Yesterday at noon the bishop presented the report in a bombastic ceremony in the cathedral; last night he was assassinated at the parish house, they smashed his head in with a brick.

Horacio Castellanos Moya has written an additional seven novels in Spanish.  I sincerely hope someone is in the midst of translating each one of them.

Palimpsestuous Manchester

I suppose one could use psychogeography to look closer at the current attempts by Manchester United (“the world’s most popular football team”) to keep its Portuguese-born star Ronaldo from defecting to the Spanish team Real Madrid, but Manchester artists are using that same discipline (perhaps to better advantage) to explore the post-industrial status of their city. Earlier I wrote about the city of Manchester in connection with its appearances in two novels: W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Michel Butor’s Passing Time. In this connection, I recommend a new blog Ruinous Recollections:

Ruinous Recollections is an art project established by two Manchester-based curators, Darien Jane Rozentals and Robert Knifton. Taking multiple stories of the city as its start point, it will create works that etch memories into Manchester’s urban canvas, re-imagining and adding layers to an already fluid city. This blog will document the project as it evolves…

Especially of interest to me was this post, describing the project by photographer Victoria Lem. As her contribution to the exhibition:

Vic photographs post-industrial ruins, uncovering ghostly remnants of preserved memory, often adding extra layers of palimpsestuous reading to her artefacts by using a time-based pin hole camera techniques and by making spectral fragmented screen prints of the images she captures – the dramatic photograph above is from a series Vic took at Barnes Hospital. Re-tracing the footsteps of Sebald, Vic will add her own memories and fictions to the city.