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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 833.914
EAN num: 9781583227855
ISBN number: 1583227857
Label: Seven Stories Press
Manufacturer: Seven Stories Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 160
Printing Date: November 01, 2007
Publishing house: Seven Stories Press
Sale Popularity Level: 482551
Studio: Seven Stories Press
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'The novelist and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz has carefully rendered these subtle currents of belief and sensibility, moving always beneath an airy conversational style, in dexterous prose.'-Virginia Quarterly Review on A Place to Live and other selected essays by Natalia Ginzburg
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 pieces culled from essays, interviews, and reviews, award-winning translator and author Lynn Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the late Sebald, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation in post-Nazi Europe. 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.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of nineteen works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and memoir. She has been nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and she won the PEN Renato Poggioli Award for Translation in 1991.
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This is NOT a stand-alone introduction. If you have not read at least two of W.G. Sebald's books, either in German or in English translation, STOP! Don't read this review and certainly don't read Lynne Sharon Scwartz's thin compendium of magazine pieces about Sebald before encountering the man himself!
The very first Sebald publication in English was The Emigrants, and I'd strongly recommend it as a starting point for new readers. The translation by Michael Hulse is extremely fine, rendering the nuances of Sebald's deliberately hesitant, gently old-fashioned prose in equally modest yet evocative English. Sebald's longest and most novelistic book, Austerlitz, was his last finished work; I like the translation less, but I'm in awe of the accomplishment, both from a literary and an emotional viewpoint. Read Austerlitz second, and then if you're not similarly awed, you'll scarcely need to look at "the emergence of memory".
Memory is both Sebald's subject and his tool. Memory is the whole person, and yet memory is both partial and selective, so that no one can ever be entirely whole. As long as memory persists, no one is entirely absent, either, since memory is a clouded looking glass between the living and the dead. Sebald's narrative style operates as a kind of rummaging in memory - his own and others - as the author/narrator recounts the efforts of others to recapture the meaning of memories and remembered artifacts. One memory often blunders upon another in Sebald's highly parenthetical style. Coincidences and chances reveal unsuspected channels of memory. Memory is the only wall against final mortality.
Sebald was in his mid forties when he wrote his very first book, a prose poem titled After Nature in its English translation. He was fifty-seven when he died in a auto accident, just in the very first flush of literary accalim. The world of journalists and critics thus had rather little time to get acquainted with the reclusive author. Lynn Sharon Schwartz has strained the thin pottage of interviews and essays about Sebald to give us the odd gobbets of biographical nutriment that comprise her book. The most interesting pieces are the five transcribed interviews, by Eleanor Wachtel, Carole Angier, Michael Silverblatt, Joseph Cuomo, and Arthur Lubow. Several of these were prepared for publications with specifically Jewish readerships.
I've debated, even as I write, whether I should endeavor to summarize any of the essays and interviews in this slender volume, or whether doing so might "spoil" the experience of reading Sebald for yourself. I've decided the latter, so my evaluation of "the emergence" can only be abstract and cursory. Sebald is both honest and elusive. Reading his responses to the questions posed by interviwers, I discovered another Sebald persona, less intellectually rarified, less somber, more amiable, more casual. Any number of suppositions I'd formed about his influences and his working methods were, by and large, confirmed. The enormous stress of being German in the post-Shoah world is never absent from his voice or his writing, but beneath his anguish and pessimism about human experience, I hear in his voice and in his writing an adoration of life such as it is, a kind of Homeric Hades where memories wander as the ghosts of heroes. Sebald fans will definitely find chunks of nutritious meat and vegetables in this little stewpot of a critical anthology.
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