There is a new Sebald conference coming next month in Bavaria. Below is (more or less) a Google translation of the original German announcement, and the German original can be found immediately following the English version. Registration information is at the end. Original source: https://www.sebald-gesellschaft.de/natur-verantwortung-zerstoerung/.
“Nature, responsibility, destruction”: Facets of Nature Writing by Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. A conference of the German Sebald Society and the International Thomas Bernhard Society on the occasion of W.G. Sebald’s 80th Birthday. May 9-11, 2024 in Sonthofen, Germany.
Program:
Thursday, 9. May 2024
6 p.m.: Opening of the exhibition of Jan Peter Tripp in the StadtHausGalerie, Sonthofen.
Friday, 10. May 2024
10.00–10.30 a.m. Ricardo Felberbaum (Kempten) and Kay Wolfinger (LMU Munich): Welcome.
10.30–11.00: Claudia Öhlschläger (University of Paderborn) & Juliane Werner (University of Vienna): Nature Writing with Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald – Introduction.
Nature Writing as a research trend?
11.30–12.30 pm: Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta): German-language Nature Writing: Hidden Traditional Lines and New Paths.
Bernhard’s and Sebald’s Nature
14.00–15.00: Bernhard Judex (Literary Archive Salzburg): Fascination of the Uncanny. Some remarks on the concept of nature in Bernhard and Sebald.
3 pm–4 pm: Renate Langer (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg): A visit to The Lime Works. W.G. Sebald reads Thomas Bernhard.
4.30–5.30: Clemens Braun (University of Vienna): “Sometimes I mean when I look, everything is already dead.” Natural histories of destruction in Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch and W.G. Sebald.
Evening event
Berit Shine (Reykjavik): K.I. as Nature Writing? (online).
Reading with Sophia Klink (Munich): Kurilensee. (Shortlisted author for the W.-G.-Sebald-Literpreis 2022).
Saturday, 11. May 2024
10.00–11.00: Alexander Honold (University of Basel): Talk on the three walkers: Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Peter Handke.
Nature in tension between responsibility and destruction: positions of Contemporary literature after Sebald.
11.30–12.30: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL Berlin): Sebald’s insects.
14.00–15.00: Christof Hamann (University of Cologne): Catastrophic natural history. W.G. Sebald’s peripatetic ars memoria.
3 pm–6.00 pm: Rita Morrien (University of Paderborn): ‘Scorched Earth’ – Marion Poschmann’s marl border and W.G. Sebald’s The Alps in the Sea.
Evening event
7.30 pm: Reading with Christoph Ransmayr (Vienna).
18.00 Uhr: Eröffnung der Ausstellung von Jan Peter Tripp in der StadtHausGalerie Sonthofen
Freitag, 10. Mai 2024
10.00–10.30 Uhr: Ricardo Felberbaum (Kempten) und Kay Wolfinger (LMU München): Begrüßung
10.30–11.00 Uhr: Claudia Öhlschläger (Universität Paderborn), Juliane Werner (Universität Wien): Nature Writing bei Thomas Bernhard und W.G. Sebald – Einführung
Nature Writing als Forschungstrend?
11.30–12.30 Uhr: Gabriele Dürbeck (Universität Vechta): Deutschsprachiges Nature Writing: Verborgene Traditionslinien und neue Wege
Bernhards und Sebalds Natur
14.00–15.00 Uhr: Bernhard Judex (Literaturarchiv Salzburg): Faszination des Unheimlichen. Einige Bemerkungen zum Naturbegriff bei Bernhard und Sebald
15.00–16.00 Uhr: Renate Langer (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg): Ein Besuch im Kalkwerk. W.G. Sebald liest Thomas Bernhard
16.30–17.30 Uhr: Clemens Braun (Universität Wien): „Manchmal meine ich, wenn ich hinschaue, es sei alles schon tot.“ Naturgeschichten der Zerstörung bei Bernhard, Frisch und Sebald
Abendveranstaltung
Berit Glanz (Reykjavik): K.I. als Nature Writing? (online) Lesung mit Sophia Klink (München): Kurilensee (Shortlist W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis 2022)
Samstag, 11. Mai 2024
10.00–11.00 Uhr: Alexander Honold (Universität Basel): Gespräch der drei Gehenden (Bernhard, Sebald, Handke)
Natur im Spannungsfeld von Verantwortung und Zerstörung: Positionen der Gegenwartsliteratur nach Sebald
11.30–12.30 Uhr: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL Berlin): Sebalds Insekten
14.00–15.00 Uhr: Christof Hamann (Universität zu Köln): Katastrophische Naturgeschichte. W.G. Sebalds peripatetische ars memoria
15.00–16.00 Uhr: Rita Morrien (Universität Paderborn): ‚Verbrannte Erde‘ – Marion Poschmanns Mergelgrenze und W.G. Sebalds Die Alpen im Meer
“The list of Anglophone writers who bear a real or critically imposed debt to the German W. G. Sebald feels endless and has been repeated to the point of tedium.” More than two decades after Sebald’s death, reviewers, literary critics, and bloggers (including this one) are still labeling writers “Sebaldian,” writers who, for the most part, nearly all use the English language. “Yet Sebaldianism has not only been a phenomenon within Anglophone letters,” writes Federico Perelmuter in an essay “Sebald and His Precursors” in the latest issue of the Southwest Review. “In fact, the intensity of Sebald’s reception in Latin American literature since the late 1990s has been at least equally notable, not least because of the intensely political undertones that Sebald’s followers in the region have given their work.” Perelmuter proceeds to name some twenty Latin American writers and three from Spain—all writing in Spanish—who have been “among Sebald’s most devoted readers.”
Perelmuter first writes about some of the reasons that Sebald’s books found a welcoming audience in Latin America. Then, he turns to the topic indicated by the title of his piece.
What a US reader might recognize as the “Sebaldian” has existed, in one way or another, in Latin American literature since about 1493. Indeed, the contestatary first-person historical novel/memoir has been a central genre in the region since what many regard as the first Latin American novel, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s 1568 The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. In that book, written when Hernán Cortés’s former underling was nearing death and suffering from a guilty conscience, the atrocities and tragedies of the Mexican conquest came to life. . . From Magellan’s journals to the Araucanato Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle to Domingo Sarmiento’s semi-fictionalized biography Facundo, Latin America has—pardon my French—always already been Sebaldian.
Perelmuter’s essay is a valuable contribution to the discussion about Sebald’s influence. But, more importantly, it’s just a fabulous essay about literature, and it gave me the names of several new writers whose books I’m anxious to read.
By the way, I have written more than once about two of the writers that play important roles in Perelmuter’s essay. I’ve written about four books by Ricardo Piglia and three books by Sergio Chejfec, both of whom were Argentinian writers.
This is the second of four posts on W.G. Sebald in Context, which came out last September. It contains thirty-eight essays on Sebald by specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East, and the United States. The volume was edited by Uwe Schütte, who studied under Sebald, knew him well, and is now widely recognized as one of the most respected Sebald scholars. If you are interested in Sebald at all, this is an important book that succinctly covers nearly every aspect of his life, career, and writings. It’s a terrific starting point to learn more about Sebald, since the writing is very accessible and the essays are short, as each was limited to 3,500 words. The volume is divided into four sections: Biographical Aspects, The Literary Works, Themes and Influences, and Reception and Legacy. The second section consists of nine essays covering Sebald’s Literary Works.
8. Melissa Etzler covers the handful of Sebald’s surviving unpublished juvenilia, which includes several very short stories, a six-page play, and an unpublished novel. These works from the 1960s “foreshadow the philosophical, historical and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction,” Etzler writes.
9. Many Sebald readers might be surprised to learn that some of his first serious writing projects were two film scripts about the lives of philosophers—one on Immanuel Kant, the other on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although both were left unfinished and unproduced, Michael Hutchins says they “bear the same thematic and aesthetic imprint as his later work.” These were Sebald’s earliest attempts to find and fund a life outside of academia, which he was finding “extremely unpleasant” under the increased bureaucracy placed on universities by the government of Margaret Thatcher. (Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until his death in 2001.)
10. The year 1986 seems to have marked a “fresh and decisive departure in Sebald’s oeuvre,” according to Paul Whitehead, who writes about his Prose Project. According to a grant application that he had submitted in February 1987, Sebald had already begun work on the book that would become Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo) in 1990, his first published book of prose fiction. Parts of this Prose Project, as Sebald called it, were also split off to become the germ of his next book, Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), published in 1992.
11. Nearly all Sebald’s books involve the writing of a biography or some aspect of his own autobiography. Christopher Singer examines how Sebald “complicates” this tendency toward Auto-/Biography by “merging fact and fiction, author- and narrative personas, memory and history, past and present.”
12. “One of the enduring intellectual appeals of his work twenty years after his untimely death is related to the rigour with which he renders ecological disasters as a literary theme.” Bernhard Malkmus explores the various ways in which Sebald uses Natural History and the Anthropocene in his books.
13. In 1995 and 1996, Sebald traveled to the French island of Corsica in the Mediterranean for research, and he began writing on his Corsica Project. But only a year later, he mysteriously stopped working on it. In the manuscript that he left behind, he wrote that he believed that Corsicans lived as though they were “pervaded through and through by the fear of death.” Lisa Kunze believes that “the rationale for this fear is firstly that, on Corsica, the landscape is steeped in the reality of nature’s formidable force. [Sebald’s] narrator becomes personally aware of this on his repeated hiking excursions across the island; it is the ‘fear of abandonment in the world’ and the ‘suspicion that one cannot do the slightest thing against the known quality of nature’.”
14. Sebald “wrote and published poetry from his early twenties until shortly before his death.” Iain Galbraith looks at the themes of his poetry: “history, nature, destruction, the Holocaust, landscapes, time, the gaze, memory, surfaces, texts, borders, journeys (mostly by train), half-way or inconclusive states, concealed orders, hearsay, astrology, arcane signs and symbols, myth and legend, and, perhaps most conspicuous of all, absences.”
15. In 2000, Sebald applied for and received a United Kingdom-funded grant to undertake a World War Project. Before his death, he had already traveled to France and Germany doing research for what he wrote would be a work of “semi-documentary prose fiction.” Richard Hibbit has studied the research files and manuscripts that remain and writes that Sebald had researched European conflicts from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Second World War., in which his father served as a German soldier in Poland.
16. “From 1990 onwards, [Sebald] was a willing interviewee and, as a writer, gave over eighty interviews for television, radio, journals and newspapers in both German and English.” Torsten Hoffmann gives a fascinating report on what can be gleaned from these interviews. He finds that Sebald can be “very candid,” but could also fall into “storytelling.” In other words, read, watch, or listen to an interview with Sebald “with the same serious approach” that you would read one of his books of prose fiction.
W.G. Sebald in Context is part of Cambridge University Press’ Literature in Context series, which now numbers more than seventy volumes, offering “comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.” I’ve already covered the section Biographical Aspects.
W.G. Sebald in Context came out last September with thirty-eight essays on the writer by thirty-eight different authors (including myself). The writers are a who’s who of Sebald specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East, and the United States. The editor, Uwe Schütte, studied under Sebald, knew him well, and is now widely recognized as one of the most respected Sebald scholars. If you are interested in Sebald at all, this is an important book that succinctly covers nearly every aspect of his life, career, and writings. It’s a terrific starting point to learn more about Sebald, especially since the writing is very accessible. The essays are short, as each was limited to 3,500 words. The volume is divided into four sections: Biographical Aspects, The Literary Works, Themes and Influences, and Reception and Legacy, and over the next month or so I will write up a brief synopsis of the essays for each of these. The first section of seven essays covers the Biographical Aspects of Sebald’s life.
1. Kay Wolfinger writes about Sebald’s ambiguous feelings about Allgäu, Germany, the place of his childhood, and his complex feelings about the idea of heimat, or the sense of having a German homeland.
2. Christoph Steker writes about the key person in Sebald’s childhood, his grandfather Josef Egelhofer. His grandfather became a father figure to him because Sebald’s own father was frequently absent and had become tainted in his eyes due to his service as a German soldier who had served in Poland during World War II. Josef introduced Sebald to some of the key German authors who he would write about later on, and Sebald came to link the image of his grandfather with the important German writer Robert Walser, since he felt they were very similar in several important ways. Steker suggests that the death of his grandfather when Sebald was twelve was the “original trauma” for the young boy.
3. Catherine Annabel explores the impact that the city of Manchester had on Sebald when he came to teach there in 1966. He was totally unprepared for a city so degraded by industrialization. Michel Butor, who had preceded Sebald as a young lecturer at the University of Manchester, wrote L’Emploi du Temps (Passing Time) in 1956, a novel that greatly influenced the works that Sebald wrote about that dealt with Manchester—the “Bleston” poems, the book-long poem Nach der Natur, and the “Max Ferber” section of The Emigrants.
4. Jo Catling examines the extent to which real East Anglia, a part of England that seems to be “at the end of the world,” matches the East Anglia that appears in Sebald’s books.
5. Florian Radvan writes about Sebald’s difficult relationship with German academia throughout his life. From the beginnings of his university career, Sebald seemed determined to rebel against the conservative German academic establishment, which he felt had “swept under the carpet” the recent German past. Radvan describes Sebald’s MA dissertation as full of “controversial theories [that] consciously sought to antagonize,” marking him as an “academic enfant terrible” and thus making him unwelcome in German academia. As a result, Sebald took up a series of teaching positions in English universities, finally settling into the University of East Anglia, where he taught until his death.
6. Duncan Large writes about the British Centre for Literary Translation, which Sebald founded in 1989 at the University of East Anglia. Three years later, Sebald’s dean said that it was “the most successful applied humanities venture the university has known.” The Centre continues to operate today.
7. Sebald, a German who spent his entire professional life living and working in England, inhabited—a “no man’s land of the in-between,” according to Rüdiger Görner. In his essay Between Germany and Britain, Görner muses on the odd position in which Sebald deliberately placed himself when he emigrated to England yet continued to write almost exclusively in German. In the end, Görner suggests, this state enabled Sebald “to penetrate the [German] past without being overwhelmed by it.”
W.G. Sebald in Context is part of Cambridge University Press’ Literature in Context series, which now numbers more than seventy volumes, offering “comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.”
A conference on W.G. Sebald will be held on Friday January 19, 2024 at at Göttingen University. Organized by Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte and Katerina Kroucheva, it is called “Zerstörerische Naturgeschichte und unheimliche Wiederkehr: A Memorial Conference in Honour of W.G. Sebald.” (Roughly translated as “Destructive Natural History and Uncanny Return: A Memorial Conference in Honor of W.G. Sebald.”) The conference will help launch the recently published book W.G. Sebald in Context (Cambridge University Press). It is is free to attend. No registration is needed, just show up. For further information, contact co-organizer Katerina Kroucheva (kroucheva@phil.uni-goettingen.de). Here is the planned schedule. (The title of each presentation is in the language that will be used by the speaker.)
9.15 am Uwe Schütte (Berlin/Göttingen) Willkommen / Einführung
9.30 am Rüdiger Görner (London) Der lange Atem des W.G. Sebald. Eine Anmutung
10.15 am Lothar Müller (Berlin) Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich. W.G. Sebald, der Satzbau und die Geschichte der deutschen Erzählprosa
11.00 am Reinhard Pabst (Montabaur) Halberstadt revisited. Sebald and Kluge
11.45 am Discussion
12.30 pm Lunch
1.30 pm Iain Galbraith (Wiesbaden) On W.G. Sebaldʼs Poetry
In 2023 I tried to be more focused in my reading. I even wrote out a brief “reading plan” for the year, but I failed—with one exception. I did finish reading all of the novels that I hadn’t read yet of the 2014 Nobel Prize winner for literature Patrick Modiano. (But then they are slim.) Instead of following my plan, random books kept beckoning, new & used bookstores lured me inside, and I was continually sidetracked.
As I started to go back through the one hundred books or so that I read in the past twelve months, it was challenging to decide which titles should be labelled the “best” of the year. I kept changing my mind until I finally settled on these eighteen as the most outstanding and memorable books of the last twelve months. Eleven of titles are novels, two are volumes of poetry, one is a biography, one is definitely unclassifiable (but non-fiction), and three are art titles. Five of the books were published in 2023. For several years I have kept a running commentary on every book I have read in a Reading Log, and you’ll find all of those under the pull-down menu Old Reading Logs at the top of this page. And just for the record, the books that I have been rereading and writing about as part of my 15 Books Project were ineligible for inclusion in this Notable Books list; they’ve gotten enough attention on their own.
In 2022, my book of the year was Claudia Piñeiro’ brilliant novel Elena Knows, from Charco Press. This year I have to highlight four books as my brilliant readings of the year, three of them from smaller presses: Danielle Dutton’sSprawl (Wave Books), Julien Gracq’sThe Peninsula (Green Integer), Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party (Transit Books), and Reiner Stach’sKafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press).
So here are my notable books from this year’s reading, alphabetically by author.
Jack Robinson (aka Charles Boyle). Good Morning, Mr. Crusoe. London: CB Editions, 2019. On the 300th anniversary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Boyle, who sometimes writes as Jack Robinson, explains how this one book more or less explains everything (and I mean everything) that is wrong with England. As he puts it, the legacy of Defoe’s novel has been three centuries of “racism and misogyny embedded in the fabric of British society.” Boyle is quite convincing and thoroughly amusing, as always. I recommend reading anything by Boyle and anything published by CB Editions.
Dionne Brand. The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. A captivating book-length prose poem in the form of a dialogue between the poet and her clerk (ostensibly the clerk on a Caribbean wharf) about a wide range of topics, including writing, poetry, memory, and art. Utterly wonderful.
“This is what I am saying, the blue clerk says, violet begins. There is this about my job, the day is a bright one, the sea billowing. Today we are on the Pacific. We arrived last night by the grey and violet sea. The bales drove us like old sails. The aphids dove in the shape of anchors. I smelled twelve thousand desert flowers. We were joined by one million bees, they slept in the folds of our documents, the oil barges watered in our eyes, the wires braceleted the great music of the ocean.”
Octavia E. Butler. Parable of the Sower. 1993. In the environmentally-ruined dystopian future—2024!—most of America has gone to the dogs and violence rules the streets. People live in small walled-off clusters, hoping to defend themselves against robbers and drug-fueled crazies who crave to set things and people on fire. After her tight little neighborhood is robbed and burnt down and many of its residents murdered, young Lauren Olamina and two others set out from Southern California and head north, hoping to find a better place to live. For better or worse, Lauren, who is Black, has the ability to feel the pain of others. She is also trying to establish, first in her mind, then among the handful of people who join her on her northward trip, a vision of a better way to live that she calls Earthseed. But to establish it, she and her band of friends must withstand terrible challenges. I’ve been circling Butler for a long time and finding this on my library’s $2 resale shelf did the trick. It’s powerful, but painful reading. And it’s striking that the first date in Lauren’s notebooks is July 20, 2024. The first book in a trilogy.
Danielle Dutton. Sprawl. Seattle: Wave Books, 2018. At the sentence level Sprawl is only chaos. The novel has an attention span of two or three sentences at most before it forgets what it is about and moves on to something else. In this sense, the restless prose of Sprawl is yet another genetic descendant of Renata Adler’s fragmented 1976 novel Speedboat. I was astounded at the writing and the haunting vision of the world that Dutton creates, a suburbia that is claustrophobic and yet beautiful, pristine and pornographic, a bit like a neighborhood trapped underneath a bell jar. With all of the current interest in chatbots and ChatGPT, there are moments when Sprawl reads as if written by a chatbot that can’t quite get English down pat. The book is a beautiful object, as is always the case with Wave Books. I wrote at some length about the book here.
James Elkins. Weak In Comparison to Dreams. Los Angeles: The Unnamed Press, 2023. A hugely ambitious novel about failure, empathy, and loneliness. But it’s also about finding peace in the arts, in this case in music. To write this book, which is apparently only one volume of a planned five-volume novel, Elkins seems to have mastered several scientific disciplines, advanced mathematics, and contemporary music. But he has harnessed these disciplines for a theme that is deeply human. The book is stuffed with b&w photographs (some which have lines drawn on them), charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages containing sections of musical scores. I wrote at some length about the book here.
Dorothee Elmiger. Shift Sleepers. London: Seagull Books, 2019. Translated from the 2014 German original by Megan Ewing. A handful of voices from an apparently random group of people located in Europe in America come and go during a book-length conversation on a variety of topics, including immigration, police brutality, sleep, and how several members of the group met each other. It’s a cousin to Virginia Woolf’s multi-voiced novel The Waves (1931). One never reads Elmiger expecting answers. I wrote at some length about the book here.
Jenny Erpenbeck. Kairos. NY: New Directions, 2023. Translated from the 2021 German original by Michael Hofmann. Erpenbeck’s compelling new novel has a simple, agonizing plot line. Katharina, a young East German theater design student, falls in love with Hans, a married novelist who is thirty-four years older. But just underneath this love story lies a world of issues ready to be engaged by any reader willing to pull at the loose threads. For example, their story can be seen as a metaphor for the love/hate relationship between the people of East Germany (officially the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) and the DDR itself. It’s a rich, powerful, and entertaining novel. I wrote at some length about the book here.
Julien Gracq. The Peninsula. Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2011. Translated from the 1970 French original by Elizabeth Deshays. In this astonishingly beautiful little book (117 pages), very little happens. Simon drives to the small railroad station in Brittany where he is to meet his girlfriend, but she has missed the afternoon train. The allows his to drive around and explore the region where he grew up until, hours later, when she arrives on the evening train. Nearly the entire book consists of descriptions of the landscapes and tiny villages that Simon passes through, descriptions that are utterly original and captivating. I have read and written about in Vertigo just about everything that Gracq wrote, all of which is prose of the highest order, and I think The Peninsula is among the two or three best books he wrote.
Mieko Kanai. Mild Vertigo. NY: New Directions, 2023. Translated from the 2002 Japanese original by Polly Barton. Mild Vertigo is a little miracle of a novel about the daily life of an average suburban Tokyo housewife, written in a kind of flattened prose in which nearly all emotions of the characters are tamped down or ignored. This is life in endless Tokyo suburbia—repressed, petty, boring, and yet, beneath the surface there is divorce, suicide, gossip about a housewife prostitution ring, and bitter jealousy. Kanai’s prose is as smooth and quiet as the suburban lifestyle is meant to be; it’s up to the reader to stay alert for the irony and the hidden gems. This is a real dark horse of a novel. I wrote at some length about the book here.
Robin Coste Lewis. To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness. NY: Knopf, 2022. This is a monster of a book, 380 pages of powerful poetry and an amazing collection of photographs that Lewis’ grandmother left behind in a suitcase beneath her bed when she died twenty-five years ago. The poems deal with Lewis’ grandmother’s generation, the Great Migration north, family, and Black life. The photographs depict Black people and Black life across the first half of the 20th century. The phrase “perfect helplessness” comes from Matthew Henson, a Black explorer (1866-1955) who went with Robert Peary on seven trips to the Arctic and is believed to have been the first of Peary’s men to reach what they believed to be the North Pole. (It probably wasn’t.) Parts of several poems in the book refer to Henson’s experiences. This is a rare book in which the poetry and the photographs interact in sophisticated, often unexpected ways.
Laurent Mauvignier. The Birthday Party. Transit Books, 2023. Translated from the 2020 French original by Daniel Levin Becker. In a remote village in France, a middle-aged couple, their young daughter, and their neighbor, who is a painter, are ready for a 40th birthday party for the mother, when three strange brothers stage a violent home invasion. The Birthday Party is a long, slow, captivating book about quickly evolving events, and the reader is alternately taken deep within the minds of the various characters. One of Mauvignier’s interests is in the ways the people damage each other and how they respond to that damage. Another is how people respond when long buried secrets about their loved ones are revealed. This book feels more like a potential movie than any book I have read in a long time, and yet so much would be lost in the film version.
Patrick Modiano. Such Fine Boys. Yale University Press, 2017. Translated from the 1982 French original by Mark Polizzotti. In his Foreword to this book, the French novelist J.M.G. Le Clezio says: “Of all Modiano’s novels, this is at once the clearest, the purest, and the most complex.” The book’s narrator looks back after about two decades on the private school he attended just after World War II, recalling one by one a series of his male classmates and other acquaintances from that time. With “cruel, precise strokes,” Modiano sketches out a world of careless parents, teenagers abandoned to their own devices, and adults who have never grown up. Such Fine Boys is stunningly written, with passages of great beauty, sadness, and regret.
Cristina Rivera Garza. The Taiga Syndrome. St. Louis: The Dorothy Project, 2018. This is a short and disorienting tale of a detective and her translator who go looking for a couple who disappeared in the taiga (a northern forest in the steppes). The taiga exerts a feral attraction to both of them, luring them deeper and deeper inside, with sinister results. The often oblique writing, which is sometimes more attracted to things at the periphery of the story, reminded me of the indie band Mazzy Star, who made dreamy, laid-back songs of great, strange beauty. This outstanding novel is part fairy tale, part X-rated Twin Peaks.
Reiner Stach. Kafka: The Years of Insight. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. The third and final volume of Stach’s astoundingly good biography of Kafka. To write this, Stach had to be completely conversant with several decades of European history of the early twentieth century and be adept in a at least a half dozen disciplines beside literature. On top of those talents, he writes so damn well. In spite of being an exceptionally detailed biography, this made for absolutely compelling reading. I am not a Kafka nut, but I have found Stach’s biography utterly enthralling—all 1,159 pages, and I have only read volumes two and three!
Enrique Vila-Matas. Because She Never Asked. NY: New Directions, 2015. Translated from the 2007 German original by Valerie Miles. Compared to the Kafka biography above, this is nothing at only 89 pages. But Vila-Matas can still make the reader’s head spin from page one. At her request, Vila-Matas writes a story for the artist Sophie Calle to act out in real life. Which she proceeds to do. Or is he making all this up? Do we believe him? Only Vila-Matas could get away with a story as ambiguous as this. Either way, it’s a great one-night stand.
Three art titles.
Percival Everett. Once Seen. Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2021. “A truth once revealed cannot be unseen.” The novelist and poet Percival Everett is also a painter. This little catalog is Percival Everett at his slyest. In 2021, he had an exhibition of his mostly abstract paintings in West Hollywood at the Show Gallery. Rather than do a traditional catalog, Everett decided to reproduce his paintings within the context of a 100-year old issue of The Crisis, the magazine founded by W.E.B. DuBois for the NAACP. The February 1921 issue dealt with the subject of lynching and contained several articles and photographs. Everett had reproductions of his paintings placed where ads had been in the magazine and he had several pages added onto the end to serve as the actual catalog. “These works came into being over a period of two years, starting in 2019 when I began work on my novel The Trees. It was the one century anniversary of the Red Summer, a summer that saw so many lynchings in the United States—that sadly has been repeated recently—that led to these paintings and the novel.” The subject of Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, which I wrote about here, was the history of lynching in America and the killing of Emmett Till. Once Seen is subversively brilliant, but the issue of The Crisis is tough reading.
Laura Freeman. Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. London: Jonathan Cape, 2023. Kettle’s Yard was the art-filled Cambridge home of Jim and Helen Ede and is now one of the world’s great house museums, left much as if the two still live there. Visiting Kettle’s Yard is one of the best art experiences I’ve ever had. Laura Freeman has done a wonderful job giving us the essential life stories for the couple, focusing on Jim, who was a Curator at the Tate for a while. The Edes supported artists when they could, bought art when they could, and lived surrounded by art all their adult lives. Once they started living in Kettle’s Yard in 1958, they would open the house during certain afternoons to students and visitors for tours of the art and the objects they had collected. Despite the title, this is more or less a dual biography of Jim and Helen, who lived quite exciting lives for many years before settling into Kettle’s Yard.
Deborah Wye. Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait. NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2017. Looking back from our vantage point, Louise Bourgeois now seems like one of the most prescient artists of the twentieth century, with her studies of relationships between men and women, between children and parents, and issues such as sex, gender, violence, nostalgia for the place of one’s childhood, and her frequent use of “women’s” materials such as fabric and manikins. After I saw “The Woven Child” in Berlin, the fabulous exhibition of her fabric-based artworks, I have been reading about her and looking more closely at her artworks. An Unfolding Portrait is a terrific exhibition catalog of Bourgeois’ prints and artist’s books, many of which I covet. Deborah Wye is one of MoMA’s best curators and she’s done a great job with this catalog. Her text is outstanding and the book is beautifully illustrated.
Cambridge University Press has just issued a new book on W.G. Sebald, edited by his former student and now one of the premiere Sebald scholars, Uwe Schütte. The volume contains thirty-eight essays on Sebald and I am pleased to say that I have contributed one of those essays, on the role that “Visual Arts and Exhibitions” have played in both the development of Sebald’s writing and the creation of his legacy. W.G. Sebald in Context is the seventy-first title in their Literature in Context series, joining authors such as Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Byron, Chaucer, Donne, and other key writers. My copy just arrived yesterday. I can’t wait to read it.
Timeline for the presentation of Michael Hersch’s sew me into a shroud of leaves at the 2019 Wien Modern Festival.
I’m sorry for the late notice, but I just learned about this event, which happens tomorrow in Brooklyn at the performance space National Sawdust, beginning at 9:00 A.M.
From their website:
Michael Hersch brings the U.S. premiere of his sprawling 11-hour new music cycle sew me into a shroud of leaves to National Sawdust for a powerful exploration of endurance. The three-part cycle, composed over 15 years between 2001-2016, finds inspiration in poets Christopher Middleton, W.G. Sebald, and Marius Kociejowski. The ardent piece’s first and last parts are written for solo piano, while the central section is scored for horn and cello. Join us for the U.S. premiere of the work that Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called “a maximal experience that was absolutely overwhelming.”
About Michael Hersch
A composer of “uncompromising brilliance” (The Washington Post) whose work has been described by The New York Times as “viscerally gripping and emotionally transformative music … claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity,” Michael Hersch is widely considered among the most gifted composers of his generation. Recent events and premieres include productions of his opera Poppaea at the Wien Modern and ZeitRäume Basel Festivals, his Violin Concerto, commissioned by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, at the Lucerne and the Avanti Festivals. His acclaimed two-act monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter has had performances in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C. Recent commissions include his elegyI hope we get a chance to visit soon at the Ojai and Aldeburgh Festivals, and his workAgatha, which had premiere performances in Bern and Geneva as part of Hersch’s residency with the Camerata Bern. Major projects in 22/23 include those for Ensemble Phoenix Basel, and a new opera for Sarah Maria Sun, Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Musikfabrik.
About Mariel Roberts
American cellist Mariel Roberts is widely recognized not just for her virtuosic performances which seethe with “excruciating intensity” (The Whole Note), but as a “fearless explorer” in her field (Chicago Reader). Her ravenous appetite for collaboration and experimentation as an interpreter, improvisor, and composer have helped create a body of work which bridges avant-garde, contemporary, classical, improvised, and traditional music.
About Jason Hardink
“A fearless interpreter of large-scale piano works both modern and historical, pianist Jason Hardink’s recent debut at Weill Recital Hall was lauded for its audacious programming and pianism demonstrating “abandon and remarkable clarity” and a “capacity for tenderness and grace” (The New York Times).
About Jacob Rhodebeck
Jacob Rhodebeck is a pianist known for his tremendous command of the instrument and his enthusiasm for performing new and little known music. Recently, Mr. Rhodebeck’s performance of Michael Hersch’s 3-hour solo piano work, The Vanishing Pavilions was described as “astounding” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and “a searing performance” (The New York Times).
About Jamie Hersch
Jamie Hersch has been widely lauded for his artistry and virtuosic command in both the standard and contemporary repertoire. An active soloist and chamber artist, he has performed with many ensembles around the world. With cellist Daniel Gaisford, he gave the world premiere of Michael Hersch’s Last Autumn in Philadelphia. It was selected by The Philadelphia Inquirer as among the Best in Classical Musicof that year. He currently serves as Associate Principal Horn with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
There is more about the various inspirations for this piece at Hersch’s website.
Forgive me for referring to Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” in a post about war, but simply swapping out one word in her lyric gives us a perfect summary of today’s subject: I’ve looked at war from both sides now. It’s even more fitting that I’ve read somewhere that the inspiration for this song came to her as she was flying in a jet plane looking down at the tops of the clouds below her.
The initial impetus for Françoise Meltzer’s bookDark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945 (University of Chicago Press, 2019) came from a number of photographs that her mother took in Berlin and other locations in Germany in 1945, immediately after the end of World War II. Her mother’s photographs mostly depict the utter ruination of German cities, the collapsed buildings and broken bridges, and the first attempts at clearing the streets brick by brick. But Meltzer is a Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and chair of comparative literature at the University of Chicago, and she is ultimately after something much larger than what her mother’s photographs can tell us about post-war Germany.
She begins by methodically examining some photographs (both her mother’s and those by some other photographers), paintings, and writings that depict the devastation of German cities in order to ask questions about human suffering. For example, how, if at all, do these depictions of ruins in any of these media help us understand the suffering of others? “Can catastrophe be persuasively represented?”
Jeanne Dumilieu, untitled, 1945.
Looking at photographs, she begins with a close reading of several of her mother’s images. She also discusses how some important critical thinkers have written about looking at photographs, including Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and several others. Importantly, she demonstrates just how easy it is to completely misread what is going on in a photograph. “How we see is always shaped by ideology,” she writes, echoing the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Ideology is whatever has “educated and thus constructed our gaze.” Keep this in mind as you read my next paragraph.
As Meltzer studies her mother’s photographs, she believes that “we are paradoxically confronting two groups of victims visually absent from the photographs.” The first group is rather obvious: “the thousands of dead civilians, covered over by rubble and ruins.” The second group is not so obvious as the first: “the millions of dead in the [concentration] camps. . . silently and invisibly hovering over the scene.” Initially, I had no problem with this concept, which she calls a “visual prosopopoeia,” or a figure of speech in which an imaginary or absent person is represented. But then I started to wonder how this would work in other circumstances. Is the Holocaust a special case or should we be seeing all sorts of dead hovering over the photographs we see daily? Should we be thinking of the countless dead Native Americans every time we see any photograph made in the United States? Should the dead of 9/11 haunt every image of New York City? What happens with images of places with divided loyalties, like Jerusalem or the Balkans? Different individuals will see different sets of the dead hovering invisibly over every image, each according to their own ideology. I dearly wish Meltzer had explored this issue more deeply and had thought beyond the Holocaust.
She also discusses a few painters, including Karl Hofer and Anselm Kiefer, and a wide range of writers and how each responded to German suffering during and after the war and, more specifically, to the Allied bombing of German cities. On the one hand, there were writers like Hannah Arendt, J. Frank Dobie, and Gertrude Stein who visited Germany soon after the end of the war and came away “convinced that the Germans are escaping their responsibility” by refusing to shoulder their share of guilt for causing the war. These writers felt that the German citizenry had deservedly brought all of the outcomes of the war down upon themselves. But there were other writers who saw the German population with greater differentiation, realizing that not everyone supported Hitler and the National Socialists. These writers tended to take a more cautionary, if not accusatory, attitude toward the Allied carpet-bombing of German civilian populations.
What Meltzer is leading up to is a warning. She and other critics and scholars have seen a recent trend in Germany to balance out all of the victims of World War II, a trend suggesting “that German victims suffered as much as any other victims.” For her, this is morally dangerous and simply a non-starter.
As I was finishing Meltzer’s bookI saw the first review appear of Sergei Loznitsa’s new film The Natural History of Destruction(2022), which I have been anticipating for some time now. In language that appears to have been provided by Loznitsa or his crew, the film was briefly described for the U.S. premiere later that happened in March at Ithaca College: “Inspired by W.G. Sebald’s treatise and created entirely from archival footage, The Natural History of Destruction mounts a harrowing critique of the killing of civilian populations during war-time—as seen in the devastation unleashed across both England and Germany during WWII.”
In an early review of the film that is full of subtle insights, Scott MacDonald, writing for The Edge notices the unusually level playing field between England and Germany that is hinted at in this description of Loznitsa’s film.
My own first experience with Natural History seems instructive. My takeaway was that the film was about the mutual brutalities of the second World War, as they played out between the U.K. and Nazi Germany. I assumed I was seeing the devastation that Germany visited on the U.K. and the response of the Allies—though my nagging feeling was that the film didn’t reveal this balance effectively: the Nazis didn’t seem to cause as much devastation as the Allies.
As I watched the film more carefully, I realized that the focus of The Natural History of Destruction is not the mutuality of destruction between the Allies and the Axis, but Loznitsa’s attempt to see the war from the point of view of the Germans—or to be more precise, to consider the full implications of the Allied response to the German war machine. . .
What is unusual about The Natural History of Destruction is Loznitsa’s emphasis throughout the film, and especially during its final minutes, on the overwhelming spectacle of the destruction visited by the U.K. and the USA on Germany. For most of us, the brutality of the German aggression that began the war and which was confirmed, after the war, by revelations of the extent of the Holocaust, has allowed us to feel that the Nazis and all Germans of that era deserved what they got. Indeed, among filmmakers I’m aware of, other than Loznitsa, only Peter Watkins—in both The War Game (1965) and The Journey (1987)—has demanded that we recognize that the Allies were astonishingly brutal in their bombardment of Germany (and, of course, in America’s case, in testing the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in fire-bombing Tokyo). . .
Loznitsa’s The Natural History of Destruction reminds us of how conveniently we’ve used the “victory” of the Allies and the war crimes of Nazi Germany to suppress our awareness, and the filmic evidence, of our own nation’s culpability in wartime horror. Implicitly, he warns us to keep our heads during the current volatile moment.
Scott MacDonald, Guernica 2.0: Loznitsa’s The Natural History of Destruction (2022)
Another, unnamed German reviewer has written:
No one speaks much in [the film] The Natural History of Destruction. The war machinery just plods on until the cities depicted are in ruins. . .
In recent years, Neo-Nazis in Germany have repeatedly used the bombings to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime. That is not Loznitsa’s intention at all.
Nevertheless, the lack of context and the focus on the suffering of the German population poses potential for criticism. Thus, “an irritatingly skewed view of the war emerges, in which the victims of Nazi terror remain a blank space,” said cultural journalist Christian Berndt on Deutschlandfunk radio. Film critic Patrick Seyboth also notes that Loznitsa’s attitude is “very consistent, but also worthy of discussion.”
Meltzer concludes her book with the wistful hope that we can somehow transcend the urge toward war.
Perhaps, in confronting representations—whether iconic or textual—the viewer can be motivated to think beyond systems of collective hatred and the vicious cycle of revenge. Perhaps the viewer will be able to think beyond the category of “enemy” and see that the real enemy, truism though this may be, is war itself, along with its political and technological machinery. Admittedly, this “perhaps” is a tenuous and very fragile one. Moreover it has been tried before and clearly failed.
Indeed.
Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945is a compelling book and I have only scratched the surface of Meltzer’s arguments. I highly recommend it.
On December 6, 2001, only eight days before the automobile accident that killed him, W.G. Sebald sat down in Los Angeles for a revealing thirty-minute interview with Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW radio’s exceptional program Bookworm. Among other topics, Sebald talked about his debt to Thomas Bernhard, who he felt was practically the only German-language author who had never compromised his writing. To be morally compromised, Sebald said, ultimately leads to being aesthetically “insufficient.” Sebald described Bernhard’s style as a “periscopic form of writing” in that he only tells you what he sees – nothing more, nothing less – a style Sebald used to some extent in Austerlitz. It’s one of the best interviews Sebald gave and now it’s available in a newly published volume Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt, published by The Song Cave. A brilliant mind and an astute reader, Silverblatt is one of the most intelligent interviewers in literature. The volume includes Silverblatt’s conversations with a very impressive group of writers: John Ashbery, John Berger, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, William H. Gass, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Sontag, and David Foster Wallace. Although Bookworm stopped production in 2022, its back catalog of broadcasts can be listened to here. Writing on the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Chris Via says: “The depth and breadth of Silverblatt’s literary knowledge is, of course, the stuff of legend.” In his review of the book he discusses each one of the interviews, most of which were multi-part endeavors. Here’s what Via says about Silverblatt’s conversation with Sebald.
One of the great pleasures of reading W. G. Sebald is his style, so it is deeply fulfilling that much of Silverblatt’s conversation with the author is dedicated to examining his prose, tracing its influences back to 19th-century German literature, and connecting it to Sebald’s appreciation for naturalist and scientific writing. At the end of this spectacular discussion, Silverblatt summarizes their talk in a breathtaking passage that bears quoting in full:
It was once explained to me that there was in German prose something called das Glück im Winkel, happiness in a corner. [I think that your radical contribution to prose is to bring] the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, […] to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world. [So] that a completely or nearly forgotten prose tone is being brought into the postmodern century, and that the extraordinary echo, almost the immediate abyss that opens between the prose and subject, is what happens, that automatically, ghosts, echoes, trance states—it’s almost as if you are allowing the world to howl into the seashell of this prose style. For me, this captures the essence of what sets Bookworm above any other program about books: Silverblatt’s manifold powers as a reader. He recalls a concept from German prose that most of us don’t know; he poetically situates Sebald’s work historically and highlights its idiosyncrasies; and he reconnects their earlier discussion about the ghostliness of the prose and the shrouded, foggy atmosphere of the pages, using imagery that hasn’t left me since I first heard it. This is why listening to (or reading) each of these conversations is like following a sacred commentary on the pleasures of reading a great book.
I began Vertigo in 2007 primarily as a vehicle for writing about W.G. Sebald and the history of fiction and poetry with photographs embedded as part of the author’s original text. I now write about a broader range of books that interest me. You can see my 11 favorite posts (from more than 600) by clicking on the Top Posts tab. And check out my yearly Reading Log, where I write something about every book I read. The categories below are only a handful of the topics covered in this blog over the years. Please use the Search field below to see if an author, book, or topic has been mentioned or discussed. To contact me, just leave a comment at any post and I will answer. Enjoy! Terry
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