W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country

Colin Dickey reviews a 'mature' posthumous work

W. G. Sebald

From Colin Dickey (Quarterly Conversation):

Though his life was tragically cut short at the height of his creative powers, W. G. Sebald has been steadily churning out work since his death. Sebald’s posthumous publications have, by and large, followed a now-standard pattern: first were the works already or nearly finished and ready for print (On the Natural History of Destruction, After Nature), then the uncollected essays which offered polished, self-contained pieces (Campo Santo), then the book of interviews, along with the books of minor poetry for which he was not primarily known (Unrecounted, Across the Land and the Water). This last, released in 2012, would seem to have been the beginning of the end of this vast reserve—Sebald’s minor poetry is interesting at times, but far below the quality of his prose works or his masterful poetic work After Nature. Reaching the end of a finite supply, it would seem that the only place left to go would be to journals, fragments of essays, or other ephemera.

Instead, 2014 sees the release in the United States of A Place in the Country: a full prose work published originally in German in 1998, between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—in other words, at the height of Sebald’s literary career. The book is a series of essays on five writers (Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, and Robert Walser) and one painter (Jan Peter Tripp), the product of what he describes, in the foreword, as an “unwavering affection for Hebel, Keller and Walser,” which in turn “gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late.” A haunting phrase, given his death only three years after the book’s publication—but one that also accurately sums up the admiration and homage that runs through the book, a writer engaging with his forebears and tracing his own literary genealogy through the past two centuries.

Not just scraps or isolated essays, it is a mature, fully realized book. While a few of the pieces were originally written separately, they’ve all been thoroughly interwoven into a holistic and coherent book, one much closer in form and ambition to The Emigrants than it is to Campo Santo. And yet it’s been withheld from an English translation for fifteen years, even as the reading public has been gobbling up lesser work. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• Photography in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz
• W. G. Sebald and Austerlitz in London
• W. G. Sebald reads Austerlitz
• Karen Stuke, After Sebald's Austerlitz

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker

A review by P. D. Smith

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

From P. D. Smith (The Guardian):

Although not intended for publication, Reveries has been hugely influential, as Russell Goulbourne's excellent introduction to his new translation makes clear. The Reveries inspired Wordsworth's ambulatory poem The Prelude and Baudelaire considered naming a collection of poems about Paris The Solitary Walker. Rousseau's walks are not urban, but there are also clear parallels with the Parisian flâneurs and the dérive of the Situationists. A powerful meditation on the quest for self-understanding. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self: Obsessed with Walking
• Will Self: Walking is Political
• Granta Interview: Nick Papadimitriou
• Richard Long: Walking Artist
• Will Self: Walking out of London

The Life and Writings of Giacomo Leopardi

A review from Open Letters Monthly

Giacomo Leopardi

From Luciano Mangiafico (Open letters Monthly):

Hard to imagine a bleaker prospect for the future: you are a writer of genius, but you are trapped in a small village in the retrograde 19th century Papal States. You are unable to leave the household that is run by a cold, fanatically religious mother and a father who, having been through the turbulence of the Napoleonic period, is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. As the son of a nobleman, it was not proper for you to attend public schools, so priests privately tutored you until you knew more than they did. You then read systematically through your father’s library, learning several classical and modern languages, and ruining both your eyesight and your already fragile health in the process. You are a hunchback, suffered from many real and imaginary maladies, were derided for your scholarly pretensions, and your hope of finding a soul of the opposite sex who would reciprocate your love was virtually nonexistent.

You were cut off by distance from the centers of European intellectual life, such as Paris and Weimar, your only means of communications was letters, and yet and yet…despite all odds, you became one of greatest Italian poets and philosophers, a living link between Rousseau and Nietzsche. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi
• James Campbell, The Library: A World History
• Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems (Paperback)
• The Waste Land Project
• Ginsberg's Cold Summer Borscht

Will Self and Others on W. G. Sebald

Four writers share their 'reveries of a solitary walker'

W. G. Sebald. Photograph: Ulf Anderson

From The Guardian:

WG Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, was an inspired essayist, quite as much as he was a novelist; indeed, I often think of his most achieved fictions – Austerlitz, and The Emigrants – as writing that tests the limits of both forms, blending them together at their margins with a kind of vaporous diffusion of their creator’s lucidity, so entirely are the invented and the real fused together. This essay on the last years of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s life exhibits all of Sebald’s strengths as a writer – and all of his strange, gnomic, secretive foibles. Ostensibly a straightforward account of Rousseau’s exiled wanderings, it begins with his first glimpse, in 1965, of the Ile Saint Pierre in Switzerland, where Rousseau spent the first period of his stateless exile, and where he claimed – in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker – that he was happier than he had been anywhere else. [Read More]

To read James Woods, Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane on Sebald, visit Guardian Review here.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald

J. M. Coetzee on Robert Walser

Coetzee reviews The Robber and Jacob von Gunten

Robert Walser

In a 2000 article for the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee reviews Robert Walser's The Robber (translated by Susan Bernofsky) and Jakob von Gunten (translated by Christopher Middleton):

On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed.

The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation.

The police photographs showed an old man in overcoat and boots lying sprawled in the snow, his eyes open, his jaw slack. These photographs have been widely (and shamelessly) reproduced in the critical literature on Walser that has burgeoned since the 1960s. 1 Walser’s so-called madness, his lonely death, and the posthumously discovered cache of his secret writings were the pillars on which a legend of Walser as a scandalously neglected genius was erected. Even the sudden interest in Walser became part of the scandal. “I ask myself,” wrote the novelist Elias Canetti in 1973, “whether, among those who build their leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life on that of a writer who had lived in misery and despair, there is one who is ashamed of himself.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Robert Walser, The Microscripts
• Robert Walser, Selected Stories
• Robert Walser, The Walk
• J. M. Coetzee on Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther
• Video Interview with J. M. Coetzee

Political Theology talks to Simon Critchley

A conversation about Critchley's recent work, The Faith of the Faithless

From Political Theology: 'Simon Critchley discusses his new book, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, with Dave True of Political Theology. Along the way Critchley touches on an array of topics: his respect for religion, the experimental nature of free thought, what love has to do with a politics of resistance, the genius of the Occupy Movement, nonviolence and its limits, the wisdom of Antonio Gramsci, and the illusions of Marxism.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley on Religion and Philosophy
• Simon Critchley Interview: The Faith of the Faithless
• Simon Critchley discusses The Faith of the Faithless
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

James Wood on Paul Auster

Profile in New Yorker magazine

James Wood of the New Yorker casts a wry eye over Paul Auster's writing career, and questions his flirtation with postmodern fiction. Wood's article begins with a parody of the quintessential Auster narrative:

Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s Confessions. A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

Yes, that précis is a parody of Paul Auster’s fiction, l’eau d’Auster in a sardonic sac. It is unfair, but diligently so, checking off most of his work’s familiar features. A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss—a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother. Violent accidents perforate the narratives, both as a means of insisting on the contingency of existence and as a means of keeping the reader reading—a woman drawn and quartered in a German concentration camp, a man beheaded in Iraq, a woman severely beaten by a man with whom she is about to have sex, a boy kept in a darkened room for nine years and periodically beaten, a woman accidentally shot in the eye, and so on. The narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a slight lack of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere. People say things like “You’re one tough cookie, kid,” or “My pussy’s not for sale,” or “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens.” A visiting text—Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett—is elegantly slid into the host book. There are doubles, alter egos, doppelgängers, and appearances by a character named Paul Auster. At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist. Hey, Roger Phaedo invented Charlie Dark! It was all in his head. [Read More]

James Wood, 'Shallow Graves: The novels of Paul Auster'

New Yorker, 30 November 2009

Simon Critchley on Krapp's Last Tape

British philosopher shares his thoughts on the Samuel Beckett play

Well, I'm back in the United Kingdom after a month in California. I arrived at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 early yesterday morning, and jetlag has prevented me from snatching more than five or six hours of sleep. As a result, I'm spending my early morning hours drinking plenty of water and catching up on a spot of reading.

Just a little earlier on I spotted an interesting blog from British philosopher Simon Critchley, writing online for the New York Times. His article, published back in May, is a response to readers' comments on a previous post, discussing life, the pursuit of happiness, and Samuel Beckett:

[...] I was delighted that one reader recalled Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which is a hugely important play to my mind, much more so than Waiting for Godot. The wizened, elderly Krapp listens obsessively to the recorded voice of a younger version of himself, who is both more hopeful and more idiotic. The portion of tape to which he listens repeatedly is an epiphanal moment with a lover while punting on a lake:

'I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.'

This passage from raises two points that came up in some of the comments: firstly, Krapp’s experience of bliss is shared with another, with a former lover. This addresses the criticism that Rousseau’s picture of happiness was solitary, indeed selfish and narcissistic. Well, narcissism is a complicated matter and we should not forget that after obsessively contemplating his image in water, Narcissus drowned himself. But the point is well-taken and I tried to acknowledge it at the end of the piece: the feeling for existence can be had with others. Perhaps it is best had with others in the experience of love, whether it is love of another person, as for Krapp, or one’s cats and dogs, as came up more than once in the comments, or indeed in being face to face with a tiger, as one reader wrote.

Secondly, the passage from Beckett reminds us that this transient experience of bliss is a recollected experience, a work of memory. This is the lost time that we go in search of. It is one thing to experience happiness in the moment; it is another to recall such memories months, years or even decades later. This is one of the reasons why we feel compelled to write at all. [Read More.]

Simon Critchley, 'Beyond the Sea'
nytimes.com, 29 May 2009