tinvan

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 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...