Sebald
Anyone who has been reading this blog and noted my Six Feet Under and death references will not be surprised to hear that my favorite part of the Oscars is the montage of all the people who died that year. So my apologies for again writing about a death, though I felt it important to comment on the fifth anniversary of W.G. Sebald's death. On December 14, 2001, he died in a car accident. He was 57, and had only started writing outside of academic work in his 40s, working in his native German even though he had spent most of his life in England.
How to describe his work? Haunting, digressive, melancholy, funny (which is often overlooked). Novels that read like odd memoirs or biographies, with indistinct photographs whose relation to the text is unclear but evocative. One of the most remarkable things about him was how quickly a writer so odd and apparently unapproachable was embraced. In only five years since his first book was translated into English, The Emigrants, he became acclaimed as the most significant writer of the day, the one readers and writers were passing on to each other as someone who had changed literature. His last novel, Austerlitz, was, amazingly, a New York Times bestseller. When people learned I was visiting Auschwitz last summer and struggled with comprehending its horrors, this book was recommended to me, and it did indeed help.
Unfortunately, not much notice has been taken of this anniversary. The best piece on Sebald I can find on the web is the collection of responses to his death (by Sontag, Geoff Dyer, and others) in The Threepenny Review, and there was a good obituary in The Guardian. There's also an interesting interview on The New Yorker site, and an audio interview with the intense literary oddball Michael Silverblatt on his Bookworm show, both from the Austerlitz tour. And here's a passage from Sebald's "The Emigrants'...I have often wished I could write as effectively as he does so effortlessly.....please enjoy!
"It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. And indeed, when I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust. He drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal sticks in the shortest of time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woolen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust, which never ceased except at night. Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when, the following morning, the moment the model had sat down and he had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper."
How to describe his work? Haunting, digressive, melancholy, funny (which is often overlooked). Novels that read like odd memoirs or biographies, with indistinct photographs whose relation to the text is unclear but evocative. One of the most remarkable things about him was how quickly a writer so odd and apparently unapproachable was embraced. In only five years since his first book was translated into English, The Emigrants, he became acclaimed as the most significant writer of the day, the one readers and writers were passing on to each other as someone who had changed literature. His last novel, Austerlitz, was, amazingly, a New York Times bestseller. When people learned I was visiting Auschwitz last summer and struggled with comprehending its horrors, this book was recommended to me, and it did indeed help.
Unfortunately, not much notice has been taken of this anniversary. The best piece on Sebald I can find on the web is the collection of responses to his death (by Sontag, Geoff Dyer, and others) in The Threepenny Review, and there was a good obituary in The Guardian. There's also an interesting interview on The New Yorker site, and an audio interview with the intense literary oddball Michael Silverblatt on his Bookworm show, both from the Austerlitz tour. And here's a passage from Sebald's "The Emigrants'...I have often wished I could write as effectively as he does so effortlessly.....please enjoy!
"It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. And indeed, when I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust. He drew with vigorous abandon, frequently going through half a dozen of his willow-wood charcoal sticks in the shortest of time; and that process of drawing and shading on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woolen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust, which never ceased except at night. Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when, the following morning, the moment the model had sat down and he had taken a look at him or her, he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper."
posted by CW at 9:18 AM
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