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Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums

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Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums By Nick Warr September 14, 2023 On Photography W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Korsika Sept 95.” I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away.   —W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam th...
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Still Small Voice The fiction of Robert Walser.

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  Still Small Voice | The New Yorker Books Still Small Voice The fiction of Robert Walser. By  July 30, 2007 Save this story Walser hiking in 1937, some years after he stopped writing entirely. CARL SEELIG/R. WALSER FOUNDATION/KEYSTONE In “Jakob von Gunten,” the 1909 novel by the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser, the hero adopts the motto “To be small and to stay small.” The words apply just as well to Walser himself, whose life and work played out as a relentless diminuendo. The up-and-coming young novelist of the period before the First World War, capable of producing three novels in as many years, turned to shorter forms, and saw his audience and his income dwindle gradually through the war years and the nineteen-twenties. Once a fixture of smart Berlin society, Walser exchanged the world of salons for a series of tiny furnished rooms and, finally, in 1929, a mental institution. Even his handwriting diminished; he was able to squeeze a last novel—a short one, but ...
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