A Place in the Country

Name: A Place in the Country
Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780812995039

By W.G. Sebald & Jo Catling

Publisher Description

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

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A Place in the Country Reviews

3.5

MatthewTed

Created 4 months ago

“72nd book of 2021. No artist for this review, instead pictures used from the text itself. 4.5. (Dropped to 4 when comparing to Sebald's novels.) As I've read all of Sebald's novels (and consider him one of my all-time favourite writers and inspirations), I'm now pushing into his other areas of written work: poetry and essays. A Place in the Country is comprised of six essays on various writers and finally an artist: Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and Jan Peter Tripp. Sebald states in his Foreword, And so it is a reader, first and foremost, that I wish to pay tribute to these colleagues who have gone before me, in the form of these extended marginal notes and glosses, which do not otherwise have any particular claim to make. He touches on the important thing about these essays right here: like his fiction, these essays are multifaceted looks at their subjects, including snatches of the autobiographical from Sebald, biographies of the subjects, from general musings, appreciations, less literary criticism and more literary (and personal) appreciation. And he ends his Foreword by saying, with all the beauty that Sebald says almost anything: I have learned how it is essential to gaze far beneath the surface, that art is nothing without patient handiwork, and that there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1624966550i/31564863._SX540_.jpg Despite being only really familiar with Rosseau, the essays were illuminating for me. Rosseau's essay is, too, perhaps, the most realised of the collection. I may believe this because it is the heaviest with Sebald's own presence. It opens as such. At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north criss-crossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another thirty-one years before this plan could be realized and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain's cap, smoked Indian bidis and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale's back—or so it is generally said. (And as we discuss Sebald discussing other writers let us take a moment to discuss Sebald himself here. This paragraph is comprised of just three Sebaldian sentences of great length and grace; his prose is effortless, wandering, that builds itself, ripple-by-ripple, until its conclusion breaks and washes us down. Even here in his essays, he presents himself as a master of prose.) And before he discusses Rosseau's work he describes the room he took: The room I took at the hotel looked out on the south side of the building, directly adjacent to the two rooms which Jean-Jacques Rosseau occupied when, in September 1765, exactly 200 years before my first sight of the island from the top of the Schattenrain, he found refuge here...; and Sebald once again expresses, firmly but subtly, a general contempt for the modern world he inhabits, At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island—during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rosseau room—among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings—a settee, a bed, a table and a chair—and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rosseau's handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, nor paused to look out the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island's southern shore. S. once told me that he had begun writing a biography on the writer A.E. Coppard (whom he oddly resembles in certain photographs, though was surprised to find people telling him this); he told me of the stories he had found throughout his research, playing cricket with Robert Graves, or breaking into Yeats' garden. The project soured though, he told me, because the family were very protective of Coppard's image and had previously attacked earlier attempts at rooting about in his life. Though I expressed disappointment, and was disappointed to see his evident excitement extinguished, he told me that visiting those places that Coppard had been had instilled in him a strange feeling. He told me not to underestimate the power of place, and the place where those that have inspired us have been. "Literary journeys", he called them, and urged me there and then to take as many as I can. I believe, he said to me, that there is a certain power there, somehow, left by them, which can find its way into us. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1624966195i/31564848._SX540_.jpg And so it's no surprise that in a similar vein Sebald writes, For me, though, as I sat in Rosseau's room, it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago. The essays retain some of the sadness always found in Sebald's prose. Some of his subjects, such as Mörike make for sad subjects. And so we see Mörike at the last sitting in the garden surrounded by his wife's relations on a hot summer's day, the only one with a book in his hand, and in the end not very content in his role as a poet, from which he—unlike his clerical calling—can no longer retire. Still he has to torment himself with his novel and other such literary matters. But for years now the work has not really been going anywhere. The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence about this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting things down which came into his head on speecial scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterwards to take these notes and 'tear them up into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing-gown.' Keller is another beautiful, sad and slightly disturbing essay. There are images imbedded in the text of his incessant writing of a woman's name, plagued by unrequited love, Betty Betty Betty, BBettytybetti, bettibettibetti, Bettybittebetti [Bettypleasebetti] is scrawled and doodled there in every calligraphic permutation imaginable. It is reminiscent of the moment Humbert Humbert asks the finder of his notebook to repeat the name Lolita for the entire page. The Robert Walser is perhaps the best essay in the collection along with Rosseau. In it, Sebald draws comparisons between Walser and Sebald's own grandfather, of dates that seem to correspond within their lives, of other strange affinities. (On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings.) https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1624967445i/31564925._SY540_.jpg This is not simply literary criticism but the understanding of the strange ways that writers, for sometimes reasons outside of our understanding, haunt us. Walser is there haunting Sebald as Nabokov haunts each of the four parts in his novel The Emigrants. It makes me wonder if there is a thread that could be found between all writers, haunting one another in some way. I remember reading recently about Kawabata's suicide (or not suicide, no one knows) following Yukio Mishima's death; and how, Kawabata, apparently, according to his biographer, had recurring nightmares about him, for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was "incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima". This collection of essays is really a reflection on the spectres in Sebald's life. And in turn he has become a spectre in my own.”

Stephen Howell

Created over 2 years ago

“Really enjoyed the essays on Hebel, Rousseau and Robert Walser.”

Created almost 7 years ago

Simon Freeman

Created about 7 years ago

Larry Love

Created over 11 years ago

About W.G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the LiteraTour Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.

Translator Jo Catling joined the University of East Anglia as Lecturer in German Literature and Language in 1993, teaching German and European literature alongside W. G. Sebald. She has published widely on both Sebald and Rainer Maria Rilke.