Silent Catastrophes

Autorentext

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. 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 and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted, Campo Santo, A Place in the Country and a selection of poetry, Across the Land and the Water.

Klappentext

Silent Catastrophes encompasses two major books of literary criticism, Describing Disaster (1985) and Strange Homeland (1991). These collections of essays examine the great German writers of modernity, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Elias Canetti and Thomas Bernheard, who were among Sebald's most important influences as a writer.

Zusammenfassung

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 'home/land', 'borderland' and 'exile' occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald's 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 Sebald's 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