Silent Catastrophes
‘We have become suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in Sebald’s case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is, the real thing’ John Banville, Guardian
From acclaimed critic, novelist and academic W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, a collection of essay on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him - appearing for the first time in English
As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighbouring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as ‘home/land’, ‘borderland’ and ‘exile’ occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own.
Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude.
'A writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity' Guardian
‘Sebald was probably the greatest intellect and voice of the late twentieth century’ Antony Beevor, The Times
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted, Campo Santo, A Place in the Country and a selection of poetry, Across the Land and the Water.
Jo Catling (Translator)
Jo Catling taught German and European literature at the University of East Anglia where she worked closely with W G Sebald from 1993 until his death. Translator of Sebalds A Place in the Country, she is editor (with Richard Hibbitt) of Saturn's Moons: W G Sebald - A Handbook (Legenda, 2011) and has published widely on Sebald and on Rainer Maria Rilke.