Best Selling Books by W.G. Sebald

A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, documents, and diaries of the Holocaust, he collects photographs—the enigmatic snapshots which stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family photo albums. Sebald combines precise documentary with fictional motifs, and as he puts the question to realism, the four stories merge into one unfathomable requiem.

After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.” The first figure is the great German Re-naissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages. After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.

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.

W.G. Sebald completed this extraordinary and important -- and already controversial -- book before his untimely death in December 2001. On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald’s harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined “silences” of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things -- such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF -- too terrible to bear. But rather than record the crises about them, writers sought to retrospectively justify their actions under the Nazis. For Sebald, this is an example of deliberate cultural amnesia; his analysis of its effects in and outside Germany has already provoked angry and painful debate. Sebald’s incomparable novels are rooted in meticulous observation; his essays are novelistic. They include his childhood recollections of the war that spurred his horror at the collective amnesia around him. There are moments of black humour and, throughout, the unmatched sensitivity of Sebald’s intelligence. This book is a vital study of suffering and forgetting, of the morality hidden in artistic decisions, and of both compromised and genuine heroics.

W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.

From the renowned author of Austerlitz (named a Top 10 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times) comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work. Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991. As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Nazi Germany, meant that concepts such as "home/land," "borderland" and "exile" occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own. Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity” (The Guardian).

A Place in the Country is W. G. Sebald’s meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind—and the last of this great writer’s major works to be translated into English. This edition includes more than 40 pieces of art, all originally selected by W. G. Sebald. This extraordinary collection of interlinked essays about place, memory, and creativity captures the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his masterly and mysterious style—part critical essay, part memoir—Sebald weaves their lives and art with his own migrations and rise in the literary world. Here are people gifted with talent and courage yet in some cases cursed by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries inhospitable or even hostile to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is conjured on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, hiding from his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where two centuries later Sebald took rooms adjacent to his. Eighteenth-century author Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite and delicate nature writing, expressing the eternal balance of both the outside world and human emotions. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his 1850 novel Green Henry, is praised for his prescient insights into a Germany where “the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider.” Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the nineteenth-century German poet beset by mood swings, depression, and fainting spells in an increasingly shallow society, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose nearly indecipherable scrawls seemed an attempt to “duck down below the level of language and obliterate himself” (and whose physical appearance and year of death mirrored those of Sebald’s grandfather). Finally, Sebald spies a cognizance of death’s inevitability in painter Jan Peter Tripp’s lovingly exact reproductions of life. Featuring the same kinds of suggestive and unexplained illustrations that appear in his masterworks Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait as seen through the experiences of others, a glimpse of his own ghosts alongside those of the men who influenced him. It is an essential addition to his stunning body of work. Praise for A Place in the Country “Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s] books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death. The scholarly craft of gathering scattered sources and weaving them into a coherent whole is transformed here into something beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate “Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News “Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.”—The Nation “Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—New York

“A splendid addition to an already extraordinary oeuvre.”—Teju Cole, The New Yorker German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz, the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that put its author in the company of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges. Now comes the first major collection of this literary master’s poems. Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, they range from pieces Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those completed right before his untimely death in 2001. In nearly one hundred poems—the majority published in English for the first time—Sebald explores his trademark themes, from nature and history, to wandering and wondering, to oblivion and memory. Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible addition to his superb body of work, and this collection is bound to become a classic in its own right. “How fortunate we are to have this writer’s startling imagination freshly on display once again, expressed in language honed to a perfect simplicity.”—Billy Collins “A watershed volume . . . nothing less than transcendent.”—BookPage “[Sebald was] a defining writer of his era.”—The New Republic

El escritor emprende un viaje a pie por el condado de Suffolk, en la costa este de Inglaterra, para llenar el vacío que se ha apoderado de su interior al haber concluido un trabajo importante. Mientras contempla paisajes solitarios y pequeñas poblaciones costeras se topa con vestigios de un pasado que le remite a la totalidad del mundo, enmarcado en multitud de épocas, espacios y personajes diferentes. Sebald funde magistralmente la autobiografía con la historia y con historias, anécdotas, conjeturas y recuerdos a caballo entre la realidad y la ficción, en los que la civilización y la naturaleza se muestran en sus variedades más amplias. Son muchos los personajes que acompañan a Sebald en su viaje interno y externo, y a los que este concede la palabra: Thomas Browne, Chateaubriand, Swinburne, Joseph Conrad, Borges...

Los relatos con orla negra de W. G. Sebald cuentan cosas cotidianas e inquietantes, son testigos minuciosos y excesivos de un desajuste pertinaz. De las grietas de la memoria asoman «hechos casuales», ya amenazadores, ya reconfortantes. Sin embargo, el leve infierno de la depresión no deja mudo al escritor, sino que parece percibir el mundo con más agudeza. Bajo el signo de la melancolía ha creado un texto de paradójica belleza. «Uno de los escritores europeos contemporáneos más misteriosamente sublimes» (James Wood, The New Republic); «Hace de la narración una investigación en estado de éxtasis» (The New York Times Book Review); «Pocos escritores le hacen a uno más consciente de los poderes seductores del lenguaje» (Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books); «Una especie de Borges teutónico con domicilio en Inglaterra... Vértigo es una obra muy personal, y nos muestra su génesis como escritor» (Sebastian Shakespeare, Literary Review).

Im August, dem Monat, der von alters her unter dem Einfluss des Saturn steht, wandert W. G. Sebald durch die einsame Heidelandschaft der englischen Grafschaft Suffolk, besichtigt verfallene Landschlösser, spricht mit alten Gutsbesitzern und stößt immer wieder auf die Spuren wundersamer Geschichten. So erzählt er von den Glanzzeiten viktorianischer Schlösser, berichtet aus dem Leben Joseph Conrads, erinnert an die unglaubliche Liebe des Vicomte de Chateaubriand oder spürt dem europäischen Seidenhandel bis China nach. Mit klarer und präziser Sprache protokolliert er jedoch auch die stillen Katastrophen, die sich mit dem gewaltsamen Eingriff der Menschen in diesen abgelegenen Landstrich vollzogen. So verwandelt sich der Fußmarsch letztlich in einen Gang durch eine Verfallsgeschichte von Kultur und Natur.

In neun Studien untersucht Sebald den Themenkomplex Heimat und Exil, der für die österreichische Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts so charakteristisch ist. Seine Arbeiten setzen im frühen 19. Jahrhundert ein, bei dem nur wenig bekannten Charles Sealsfield und schlagen den Bogen über die gleichfalls vernachlässigten Schtetlgeschichten Leopold Komperts, über den Wiener Fin-de-siècle-Literaten Peter Altenberg, über Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth bis hinein in die Gegenwart, die durch Jean Améry, Gerhard Roth und Peter Handke vertreten ist. All diesen Autoren ist gemeinsam, daß sie an der »Unheimlichkeit der Heimat« gelitten haben bzw. noch immer leiden. Behutsam macht Sebald deutlich, wie oft dieses Leiden an der Heimat sowie die vage Sehnsucht nach ihr für österreichische Autoren zum Thema, wenn nicht sogar Anlaß des Schreibens geworden sind. Leseprobe

Endlich in einer Neuausgabe: Sebalds vielgerühmtes Meisterwerk über vier Auswanderer. Aus Gesprächen mit deren Freunden, aus Erinnerungen, aus Tagebüchern und Fotoalben sowie aus Besuchen der Schauplätze ihrer Leben rekonstruiert der Ich-Erzähler die teils fiktiven Biografien dieser vier Männer. Ihre Wege führen aus dem provinziellen Deutschland hinaus in die Schweiz, nach Frankreich und England und bis in die fernen Wunderstädte New York und Jerusalem, bevor sie im Alter schließlich an ihrer Vergangenheit zerbrechen. Dabei erzählt Sebald indirekt auch von sich selbst - von seinem Schmerz über das Schicksal dieser Menschen, von seiner Trauer über die deutsche Vergangenheit.

En este poema en prosa, W. G. Sebald hizo de su amor a la Naturaleza, pero también de su temor a ella, su tema decisivo: Del natural, una obra maestra del lenguaje sobre la vida de tres personajes que sintieron dolorosamente, cada uno a su manera, el conflicto entre Hombre y Naturaleza, es un libro insólito de un escritor que sólo escribió libros insólitos. Subtitulado «poema rudimentario», encarnación de un género que no es poesía libre ni prosa poética sino, simplemente, literatura, Sebald no llegó a verlo editado, pero tenía las pruebas de imprenta en su correo cuando ocurrió el accidente que en 2001 acabó con su vida. Lo asombroso es que este libro, probablemente el primero que escribió Sebald, muestra a un autor increíblemente maduro, dueño ya de todos sus recursos (Kafka, Robert Walser o Bernhard son sólo una presencia lejana) y de una erudición desconcertante. Del natural merece más de una lectura para descubrir el complejo juego de relaciones entre los tres personajes que retrata. Sebald no hace nunca concesiones, pero un lector avezado reconocerá quizá un guiño a Wordsworth aquí o una alusión a las profecías de Alois lrlmaier allá. Sin embargo, no hace falta tener una cultura tan inmensa como la del propio autor para dejarse arrastrar y cautivar. Leyendo este libro se comprende muy bien por qué se dice siempre que W. G. Sebald produce adicción.

In diesen aufschlußreichen sowie brillant formulierten Essays zu Werken von Stifter, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal und Kafka, von Canetti, Bernhard, Handke, Ernst Herbeck und Gerhard Roth gelingt es dem Schriftsteller und Literaturwissenschaftler Sebald, einige bislang oft wenig beachtete Merkmale österreichischer Literatur ins Blickfeld zu rücken. Im Mittelpunkt seiner Analysen stehen die psychischen Voraussetzungen des Schreibens, insbesondere »das Unglück des schreibenden Subjekts«, mit dem Sebald die eigentümliche Schwermut in der österreichischen Literatur zu erklären versucht. Einfühlsam geht er der Frage nach, inwiefern persönliche Existenznöte, aber auch historische und politische Kalamitäten das Schreiben dieser österreichischen Autoren jeweils beeinflußt haben, und folgert: »Die Beschreibung des Unglücks schließt in sich die Möglichkeit zu seiner Überwindung ein«.

Quattro personaggi intrecciano negli Emigrati la loro vita con quella dell’autore: Henry Selwyn, brillante chirurgo e uomo di mondo, ritiratosi in tarda età nella torre di una casa della campagna inglese dove Sebald affitta in gioventù un appartamento; Paul Bereyter, promeneur walseriano e maestro elementare del futuro scrittore in una scuola di paese; il prozio Ambros Adelwarth, cameriere negli hotel di lusso di mezzo mondo e maggiordomo presso l’alta società; il pittore Max Ferber, compagno di lunghe conversazioni serali a Manchester. Quattro personaggi legati alle vicende del popolo ebraico, spaesati ed errabondi, di cui Sebald ripercorre il cammino andando in cerca di amici e testimoni, diari, documenti, ritagli di giornali, fotografie, cartoline, e intessendo come sempre parola e immagine fotografica in un’investigazione che è anche indagine sul proprio sradicamento. Se in Austerlitz Sebald si ritrarrà sullo sfondo, qui è egli stesso a prendere in mano il filo del ricordo, dispiegando una struggente sinfonia dei senza casa: dall’inizio in sordina del primo movimento, lacerato da uno sparo finale, al corpo ascetico del maestro Bereyter disteso sopra i binari, con l’abetaia innevata sullo sfondo, alla storia di Ambros Adelwarth, dove il tripudio di luci, profumi, colori declina nelle atmosfere cupe di una clinica psichiatrica, fino al lento ripiegarsi di una vita fra le brume di Manchester, nelle penombre dei pub al porto o dell’atelier dove Ferber disegna e cancella senza tregua la propria opera.

Piogge di fuoco divorante, mari tempestosi, ghiacci e rocce di un mondo vuoto di uomini, luci radianti, deserti combusti: con somma potenza di immagini, con il ritmo che il verso libero imprime a un linguaggio avvolgente, e in un costante intreccio di saperi (arte, scienze naturali, letteratura), Sebald ci offre nel poemetto "Secondo natura" – opera prima – un trittico che già contiene in nuce i caratteri della sua futura narrativa. I passeggiatori e gli emigrati dei romanzi e dei racconti sono già tutti qui prefigurati: la tragica vita del pittore Grünewald e di un suo misterioso doppio nella terrificante descrizione di opere come la pala d’altare di Isenheim; il viaggio dell’esploratore e medico settecentesco G.W. Steller alla scoperta, con Vitus Bering, dello stretto marino fra i ghiacci della Siberia e dell’Alaska; un’autobiografia, dalla nascita sotto le bombe, in un mattino di primavera, alle peripezie della famiglia e ai vagabondaggi europei, così simili a quelli di Jacques Austerlitz. "Secondo natura" è il primo dei tanti viaggi che Sebald ha intrapreso nei territori di una Natura colta con sguardo snebbiato, nelle sue incessanti metamorfosi. Un viaggio illuminato da una possente visionarietà.

"Schwindel. Gefühle" ist das Buch, mit dem W.G. Sebald auf einen Schlag berühmt wurde. In vier ganz eigenständigen Kapiteln, in einer atemberaubend schönen Sprache, verknüpft W.G. Sebald Figuren und Zeiten, autobiographische Bekenntnisse, Kindheitserinnerungen und Reiseberichte zu einem faszinierenden Ganzen. Der französische Soldat Henri Beyle, der als Stendhal Weltruhm erlangte, und der Prager Angestellte Franz Kafka, der zu einem der bedeutendsten Schriftsteller der Moderne wurde, das sind die Helden von Sebalds Erzählen: Helden der Melancholie, Helden der vergeblichen Liebe und Helden der Literatur.

"Pellegrinaggio in Inghilterra" recita il sottotitolo. E di un viaggio solitario si tratta, d''estate e per lo più a piedi, nel Suffolk, dove Sebald visse sino all''ultimo: in uno spazio delimitato da mare, colline e qualche città costiera, attraverso grandi proprietà terriere in decadenza, ai margini dei campi di volo dai quali si alzavano i caccia per bombardare la Germania. Viandante saturnino, Sebald ci racconta – lungo dieci stazioni di un itinerario che è anche una fuga – gli incontri con interlocutori bizzarri, amici, oggetti, in cui si rispecchia quella «storia naturale della distruzione» che scandisce il cammino umano e il susseguirsi degli eventi naturali. E ci racconta di altri vagabondaggi ed emigrazioni, di cui la sua vicenda personale è estrema eco: quelli di Michael Hamburger, poeta e traduttore di Hölderlin, profugo dalla Germania; di Joseph Conrad, che nel Congo conosce la malinconia dell''emigrato e gli orrori del paese di tenebra; di Chateaubriand, esule in Inghilterra; di Edward FitzGerald, eccentrico interprete della lirica persiana, una di quelle figure ascetiche, capaci di vivere con poco e nulla, a noi familiari dagli "Emigrati" ad "Austerlitz". Si inframmezzano squarci della storia antica e d''oggi (le efferatezze del Celeste Impero, le violenze della Seconda guerra mondiale) a far da contrappunto a terremoti, diluvi, catastrofi della natura o alle sofferenze inflitte da un''economia rapace. Pellegrinaggio e insieme labirinto, nella migliore tradizione sebaldiana: ma a guidare scrittore e lettore vi è un filo. Un filo di seta: la storia della sericoltura che, muovendo da Thomas Browne, percorre carsica gli Anelli di Saturno. Nelle sue tappe Sebald declina, attraverso una narrazione dotta e visionaria, l''endiadi di lusso e sofferenza – con la vaga speranza che vi sia sopravvivenza nella metamorfosi e nel bello.

Per molti anni, anzi quasi fino a oggi, vi è stato in Germania un argomento tabù per eccellenza: la distruzione senza precedenti causata nella seconda guerra mondiale da oltre un milione di tonnellate di bombe, che piovvero su centotrentuno città tedesche provocando seicentomila morti fra i civili e sette milioni di senzatetto. Poiché i tedeschi erano colpevoli e dovevano elaborare la loro colpa, ciò che un intero popolo aveva patito era destinato a passare sotto silenzio. Quando nel 1997 Sebald trattò questo tema in una serie di memorabili lezioni a Zurigo – ed erano lezioni, si badi bene, di poetica –, sapeva benissimo di toccare un nervo scoperto. E nessuno come lui si sarebbe rivelato capace di farlo. Nel dar voce a testimonianze oculari di implacabile precisione, Sebald ci conduce nell’epicentro del fuoco distruttivo che incenerì, ad esempio, Amburgo, mettendo a protocollo quell’orrore in gran parte rifuggito dagli scrittori tedeschi: la madre con il cadavere carbonizzato del suo bambino dentro la valigia e la famiglia che sorseggia beatamente il caffè seduta al balcone in un sobborgo risparmiato dall’area bombing; il libraio che tiene sotto il banco e mostra ai clienti di fiducia le foto dei cadaveri accatastati in strada, delle case sventrate, dei cieli in fiamme, e la massaia che lava i vetri dell’unico edificio svettante in mezzo a un deserto di macerie. Il lettore ritrova qui la stessa tonalità dell’opera letteraria di Sebald, la stessa pietas verso uomini e oggetti che ispira tante pagine della sua narrativa. Così questa cronaca di orrori diventa un contributo a una "Storia naturale della distruzione" (come avrebbe dovuto intitolarsi un saggio del britannico Solly Zuckerman sul bombardamento a tappeto che devastò Colonia): una storia naturale in cui hanno cessato di valere le categorie di libertà e scelta – e tutto si muove insieme come un efferato e inarrestabile meccanismo. Dopo le immani risorse profuse nella costruzione di aerei e ordigni non sarebbe stato infatti concepibile per gli Alleati scaricare le bombe in mezzo ai campi e impedire che cogliessero il loro «naturale» bersaglio: questo sostiene un generale americano a cui non sarebbe certo bastato che un’immane bandiera bianca venisse fatta sventolare sul campanile di una chiesa dagli abitanti di una città-bersaglio. E come immagine allegorica si staglia il bombardamento dello zoo di Berlino, con la visione apocalittica dei pachidermi che bruciano vivi, dei loro corpi smembrati, delle loro urla furiose.