W.G. Sebald’s essays from beyond

When W.G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, he was eulogized by the Anglophone literary world as the author of four singular novels. Artfully fusing fact and fiction and interlarded with grainy and blurry photographs, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, and Austerlitz revolve around real-life characters and invented figures who are either buffeted and displaced by historical forces or afflicted by dread, melancholy, and disorientation on soul-searching pilgrimages. In each of these beguilingly allusive, evasive, discursive, and meditative novels, Sebald addresses the difficulties in grappling with the past. Memory is “a kind of dumbness,” he writes in The Emigrants. “It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding

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