WG Sebald ransacked Jewish lives for his hallucinatory fictions

Judith Shulevitz: The German author was hailed for his ghostly literary world of fragments, snippets and vagueness. Now he is being accused of lying about his sources

THE GREAT GERMAN author WG Sebald died in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57, 13 years after he’d published his first work of literature and five short years after the English translation of a book of stories set in motion his rise to international renown. (Months before his death, he was rumoured to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize.)

Throughout his career and afterward, critics struggled to find words to describe the hallucinatory quality of his deceptively sober prose. Sebald tells tales, that much one can say—ghost stories of a sort, as dark and translucent as smoky glass. Displaced Jews haunt some of these narratives; the shades of literary figures—Kafka, Stendhal, Nabokov—materialise in others.

And yet Sebald writes like a man typing up case histories, and he accompanies his narratives with something like documentation—photographs of people, facades, notes, newspaper articles, train tickets. These have no captions, and you don’t always see how they relate to the text.

The Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte called Sebald’s method bricolage, which can mean both “collage” and “tinkering.” The critic James Wood speaks of “fictional truth,” and also offers this aptly mournful phrase: “cinders of the real world.” The poet Michael Hamburger came up with “essayistic semi-fiction which gives rope to both observation and imagination.”

In her new biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, the first life of the writer, Carole Angier calls that “the neatest summary” of Sebald’s method that “anyone ever managed.” I like “periscopic,” which Sebald used, because it captures the subaqueous stillness of his worlds, and his disorienting angle of vision.

FULL STORY WG Sebald ransacked Jewish lives for his fictions (The Atlantic)

Illustration: The Atlantic