Volume 52, Number 13 · August 11, 2005
The Solitary Notetaker
By Charles Simic
Campo Santo
by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Random House, 221 pp., $24.95
Unrecounted
by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, with lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp
New Directions, 109 pp., $22.95
When W.G. Sebald died in a car accident in December 2001, he was eulogized in Great Britain and America as one of the great writers of our time. And yet, before his first book, The Emigrants, was translated into English in 1996, very few had ever heard of him outside Germany. The reception of that first book and the others that soon followed in quick order was simply astonishing. He was called one of the most original voices to have come out of Europe in recent years, a Teutonic Borges, strange, sublime, and haunting. 'Is literary greatness still possible?' Susan Sontag asked in the TLS and then replied: 'One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.' Since his death, however, there have been differing views. What at first appeared to be a seamless prose style turned out to be on closer examination a patchwork of literary borrowings. His books, it seemed, were as much the product of his vast erudition as they were of his own imagination and experience. This raises the question whether a writer who draws many of his ideas from other writers can still be called an original. If anyone can, Sebald may be the one.
Review, 4125 words
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