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The Solitary Notetaker

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August 11, 2005 issue Reviewed: Campo Santo by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell Random House, 221 pp., $24.95 Unrecounted by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, with lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp New Directions, 109 pp., $22.95 W. G. Sebald; drawing by David Levine Buy Print When W.G. Sebald died in a car accident in December 2001, he was eulogized in Great Britain and America as one of the great writers of our time. And yet, before his first book,  The Emigrants , was translated into English in 1996, very few had ever heard of him outside Germany. The reception of that first book and the others that soon followed in quick order was simply astonishing. He was called one of the most original voices to have come out of Europe in recent years, a Teutonic Borges, strange, sublime, and haunting. “Is literary greatness still possible?” Susan Sontag asked in the  TLS  and then replied: “One of the few answers available to English-...

W.G. Sebald: A Profile

The Paris Review Subscribe W.G. Sebald: A Profile James Atlas Issue 151, Summer 1999 “It was an escape route, something entirely private,” Max Sebald mutters as he rummages through a thick folder of old photographs. A boy in a white gown and caftan; a graveyard with tilted headstones; a turn-of-the-century spa: they’re the kind of photographs you’d come across in a junk shop, leafing idly through a box of postcards. Which is more or less where Sebald found them. He had been collecting photographs for years before he began to write, he explains, scouring the shops in the seaside towns of East Anglia, where he’s lived since emigrating from Germany in 1970, for images to put in his books—or rather, to serve as their catalysts. “Not even people in the house knew what I was up to; I’d just retire to my workshop and potter about. I think it was these photographs that eventually got the better of me.” They had got the better of me, too. In fact they were a large part of the reason I was sitti...

The Rings of Sebald

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The Rings of Sebald By  Daniel Mendelsohn   October 1, 2020 Arts & Culture W. G. Sebald. Photo: © Jerry Bauer. Courtesy of New Directions. The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of course. I was a fervent model-maker in my early teenage years, often devoting all of my after-school time to making intricate reproductions of buildings from antiquity. Of these, the Parthenon was the object of an almost obsessive interest. After making my first model of it for a class project when I was about twelve, using cardboard toilet paper rolls to stand in for the original’s elegantly fluted Doric columns, I embarked on creating a proper scale model, three feet wide by six feet long, the ambitiousness of which now strikes me as almost absurd and the construction of which was never completed, although it absorbed the next five years...