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
''A writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity'' Guardian
Silent Catastrophes brings together for the first time in English the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991.
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 âhome/landâ, âborderlandâ and âexileâ occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebaldâs 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 Sebaldâs 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.
''One of the most important writers of our time'' A. S. Byatt
About the AuthorsW. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. 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, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of
The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal,
The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001. Michael Hulse and Simon Rae (Translators)
Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. He is based in Warwick. Simon Rae is a playwright , novelist and broadcaster (he presented Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' for several years). He lives in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Both Michael Hulse and Simon Rae are published poets and winners of the National Poetry Competition.
Industry Reviews
A profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature . . . Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential writers of this generation . . . Nobody captures the epitaph quality of pastoral as well as he did * The Scotsman *
Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature * New Yorker *
Sebald is surely a major European author . . . he reaches the heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust * Independent *
W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time -- Peter Carey
Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald * New York Times *
Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century * The Times *
