W.G. Sebald

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/26/reviews/980726.26silmant.html -- W.G. Sebald ---By ROBERTA SILMAN (review)

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THE RINGS OF SATURN
By W. G. Sebald.
Translated by Michael Hulse.
Illustrated.

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"This is a hybrid of a book -- fiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir -- that obliterates time and defies comparison. Stunning and strange, it may remind you of Zbigniew Herbert's ''Still Life With a Bridle'' or Nabokov's ''Speak, Memory,'' or the work of Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin or even Jonathan Swift, yet by the end you know it is like none of these. For it is written in a voice so confident, so sympathetic and so much its own that it cannot be in any sense called derivative." ...

[promtbr]

Sebald is a wonderful writer and major voice of Post WWII Fiction. Austerlitz and Vertigo also bear reading.He was not prolific, as he died suddenly in a car wreck in the UK.

[mal4mac]

Great quote:

''For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane.''

For "writing" read "posting to LitNet" :wave:

[quasimodo1]

''Anxious, daring, extreme, muted -- only an annulling wash of contradictory adjectives can approach the agitated density of W. G. Sebald's writing,'' wrote the critic James Wood in The New Republic. ''For this German who has lived in England for over 30 years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary European writers.'' ...from the nyt obituary by Mel Gussow --

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html?scp=3&sq=W.G.%20Sebald&st=cse