W.G. Sebald – författare

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot.What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber are exiled across a shattered Europe.Set across Europe and America from the late nineteenth century through the aftermath of the Holocaust, The Emigrants reconstructs lives marked by displacement and loss.Through photographs discovered in drawers, half-remembered conversations and the slow reconstruction of letters and diaries, The Emigrants pieces together lives fractured by exile. Each man carries a private history of displacement, from pre-war Europe through the rise of Nazism and the shadow of the Holocaust, and each story circles loss that cannot be fully recovered. The narrator’s careful investigations reveal silences, evasions and the quiet weight of trauma that persists long after physical escape.At first The Emigrants simply documents the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.'I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' Spectator

‘Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed’ Anita Brookner, SpectatorWhat could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona? Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of Sebald’s compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself.‘As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell… [Sebald] entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires’ Robert McCrum, Observer

‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The TimesWhat begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.‘A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas… Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears’ Teju Cole, Guardian

From one of the undisputed masters of world literature, a haunting novel of sublime ambition and power about a man whose fragmentary memories of a lost childhood lead him on a quest across Europe in search of his heritage.Jacques Austerlitz is a survivor – rescued as a child from the Nazi threat. In the summer of 1939 he arrives in Wales to live with a Methodist minister and his wife. As he grows up, they tell him nothing of his origins, and he reaches adulthood with no understanding of where he came from. Late in life, a sudden memory brings him the first glimpse of his origins, launching him on a journey into a family history that has been buried.The story of Jacques Austerlitz unfolds over the course of a 30-year conversation that takes place in train stations and travellers’ stops across England and Europe. In Jacques Austerlitz, Sebald embodies the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the mind’s defences against trauma. Along the way, this novel of many riches dwells magically on a variety of subjects – railway architecture, military fortifications, insects, plants and animals, the constellations, works of art, a small circus and the three cities that loom over the book, London, Paris and Prague – in the service of its astounding vision.From the Hardcover edition.

W. G. Sebald completed this extraordinary, important and controversial book before his untimely death in December 2001. It is a harrowing study of the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment in World War II, and an examination of the silence in German literature and culture about this unprecedented trauma. On the Natural History of Destruction is an essential and deeply relevant study of war and society, suffering and amnesia. Like Sebald’s novels, it is studded with meticulous observation, moments of black humour, and throughout, the author’s unmatched intelligence and humanity.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Inspired by an old photograph album to investigate the life of a lost relative, a man finds himself on a journey that traverses the 20th century, leading him from an American asylum to the shores of the Dead Sea. Adapted by Edward Kemp from W G Sebald''s acclaimed novel about the experiences of Jewish emigrants. Starring John Wood, Henry Goodman, Eleanor Bron, Ed Bishop, Margaret Robertson, Andrew Sachs, Cosmo Solomon, Thomas Arnold, Jasmine Hyde and Maximilian Graber. Music by Gary Yershon. Directed by Edward Kemp.

‘Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed’ Anita Brookner, SpectatorWhat could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona? Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of Sebald’s compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself.‘As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell… [Sebald] entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires’ Robert McCrum, Observer

‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The TimesWhat begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.‘A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas… Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears’ Teju Cole, Guardian

Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber are exiled across a shattered Europe.Set across Europe and America from the late nineteenth century through the aftermath of the Holocaust, The Emigrants reconstructs lives marked by displacement and loss.Through photographs discovered in drawers, half-remembered conversations and the slow reconstruction of letters and diaries, The Emigrants pieces together lives fractured by exile. Each man carries a private history of displacement, from pre-war Europe through the rise of Nazism and the shadow of the Holocaust, and each story circles loss that cannot be fully recovered. The narrator’s careful investigations reveal silences, evasions and the quiet weight of trauma that persists long after physical escape.At first The Emigrants simply documents the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.'I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' Spectator

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.

In neun Studien untersucht Sebald den Themenkomplex Heimat und Exil, der für die österreichische Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts so charakteristisch ist. Seine Arbeiten setzen im frühen 19. Jahrhundert ein, bei dem nur wenig bekannten Charles Sealsfield und schlagen den Bogen über die gleichfalls vernachlässigten Schtetlgeschichten Leopold Komperts, über den Wiener Fin-de-siècle-Literaten Peter Altenberg, über Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth bis hinein in die Gegenwart, die durch Jean Améry, Gerhard Roth und Peter Handke vertreten ist. All diesen Autoren ist gemeinsam, daß sie an der »Unheimlichkeit der Heimat« gelitten haben bzw. noch immer leiden. Behutsam macht Sebald deutlich, wie oft dieses Leiden an der Heimat sowie die vage Sehnsucht nach ihr für österreichische Autoren zum Thema, wenn nicht sogar Anlaß des Schreibens geworden sind.Leseprobe