Word: sebald
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who sets out to uncover his origins and early childhood—a curious void in his memory—after suffering a mental breakdown. His journey leads him to confront the dark heart of European history. In this, his final novel, author W.G. Sebald synthesizes multiple literary genres: “Austerlitz” is at once autobiography, history, travelogue, and meditation. It’s publication in 2001—mere months before his death in a car accident—echoed the sentiment of closure, or the struggle for some semblance thereof...
...Henry James’s preference for that time in the day when shadows begin to lengthen—what he called “the divine dusk.” But while for James this atmosphere was one in which history glimmered, offering up its inspiration, for Sebald, the impending darkness serves as a metaphor for the inscrutability of the past and the impossibility of self-knowledge. The narrator first realises this during his visit to the Breendonk fortress in Belgium, which was transformed into a concentration camp by the Nazis: “The darkness does not lift...
Shortly after “Austerlitz” was published, Sebald died in a car crash, aged 57. At the time, he was tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements, including the meditative travelogue “The Rings of Saturn,” and “The Emigrants,” which tells the story of four individuals who—like Austerlitz—managed to escape the Holocaust but were forever haunted by the fate of those...
Omega Minor has now finally arrived in the U.S. and Britain, the first of Verhaeghen's three novels to be translated into English. Critics are comparing him to such German masters as Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald, as well as to science-minded American novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Richard Powers. Indeed, Powers - who has lived in Holland - helped find a U.S. publisher for the book, calling it "amazing" and praising Verhaeghen for taking on "the whole 20th century in a single novel...
...though Ackerman ripped entries out of her personal field journal and pasted them into the book alongside Antonina’s diary. The book’s style is not revolutionary: well-known writers as far back as Twain incorporated mixed media into their novels. More recently, W.G. Sebald sprinkled his prose with photographs in “The Emigrants.” And Ackerman’s speculations on Antonina’s diary entries are reminiscent of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “A Midwife’s Tale.” But what...