4.0
The Emergence of Memory
ByPublisher Description
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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Emergence of Memory Reviews
4.0
“119th book of 2022.
4.5. Fantastic stuff, but I have a great bias towards Sebald. I often, somewhat flippantly, say the beginning of the last century belonged to Joyce, the latter half, to Sebald. Sometimes when I am writing my own things, on those common days of literary abandonment that ironically Sebald himself knew so well, I think, What is the point when there was already a man so good? I lack Hemingway's bravado, when he said something along the lines of, 'You have to read the Greats, so you know who to beat.' If I can, I read anything that involves Sebald in one way or another, even if something is called 'Sebaldian', I jump at it. Inside this slim volume you'll find transcripts from interviews with him as well as essays concerning him. One of the transcripts from an interview by Carole Angier, writer of Sebald's first biography, which was published last year (and worth a read). This interview dates from the late 90s, so Angier's obsession with the man has only grown with time. Another is the 2001 interview with Silverblatt, an interview I've listened to more times than I can count. For one, it is an excellent interview. For another, the interview took place 8 days before Sebald's death, and has the haunting unknowingly-close-to-death power.
If you've read Angier's biography, Speak Silence, then her interview only touches upon a few things she later explodes into greater detail. It begins her unpacking of Sebald's genre and his 'truth'. In one segment she asks, who Max Ferber, from The Emigrants is based on. Sebald replies,
Ferber is actually based on two people. One is my Manchester landlord, D. The story of Ferber's escape from Munich in 1939 at the age of fifteen, and of what subsequently happened to his parents is D's. The second model is a well-known artist.
Angier then asks, '"Which of the two, then [...] is in the photo of Ferber as a boy?'" And 'He smiles, a combination of the ironic and the open, and says, "Neither."' Sebald later says to Angier that one of the entries from his great-uncle's diary, from the same book, is a 'falsification', Sebald wrote it himself. But, he says,
'What matters is all true. The big events - the schoolteacher putting his head on the railway line, for instance - you might think they were made up for dramatic effect. But on the contrary, they are all real. The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time, to provide l'effet du réel.'
The other essays provide more glimpses into Sebald's writing world. My adoration of him comes from his sentences, his dark almost invisible wit, his staggering control and command over his narratives... I think when you read Sebald, even if you don't enjoy him, you must feel awe. I recently read The Rings of Saturn again and on reaching the final page, again, I just felt as if I wanted to turn back to the first. You say to yourself, 'How does he do it?' There is something reserved about the whole ordeal, something poetic, pretentious, sometimes, yes, boring, other times infuriating, but all his books just beg to be read over and over. There is something irresistible about them. In a sick way I loved to read about his own struggles writing, sometimes it is hard to imagine his books being difficult to him.
That's the paradox. You have this string of lies, and by this detour you arrive at a form of truth which is more precise, one hopes, than something which is strictly provable. That's the challenge. Whether it always works of course is quite another matter. And it's because of this paradoxical consolation that these scruples arise, I imagine, and that the self-paralysis, writer's block, all these kinds of things can set in. I had rather an awful time with this book that's going to come out ['Austerlitz']. I don't know how many months I couldn't get . . . Normally on a good day I can do three pages handwritten, just about. But this, I never even got to the bottom of the first page. I started at seven in the morning till five in the evening. And you look at it. One day you think it's all right; you look at it the next day, it's awful. I had to resort to writing only on every other line so as to get to the bottom of the page. [Audience laughter.] I found that a very humiliating experience, but it did the trick in the end. But that's how it is. And it's very, very hard, I think, as most writers know; doubts set in, to keep one's nerve is difficult. Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau's letters, for instance, they're beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they're all balanced, they're all beautiful prose. Flaubert's letters are already quite haphazard; they're no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they're very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it's getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.
One of the saddest things in all the interview however were his allusions to the 'next' one: 'The Emigrants was more difficult than this, and the last one I could hardly do, so I dread to think what the next one will be like. [Audience laughter.]' Of course, he never wrote another, dying in 2001. Another essay sheds a glimpse of light: 'At the time of his death, Sebald was researching a book that would explore, among other subjects, his family history.' Some of the final lines of the last essay throw a number of adjectives, all of them questioningly applicable to Sebald himself, and his work, disconsolate, bitter, dark, theatrical, dour, inconsolable . . . He was a rare talent.”
“http://winterlief.blogspot.nl/2013/11/the-emergence-of-memory.html”
About W.G. Sebald
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ is the author of fourteen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as the widely acclaimed memoir, Ruined by Reading. Her first novel, Rough Strife (1981), was shortlisted for a National Book Award and a PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award while her Leaving Brooklyn (1989) was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. She won the 1991 PEN Renato Pogglioli Award for her translation from the Italian of Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu. Schwartz is a native and current New Yorker.
Other books by W.G. Sebald
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