A Place in the Country, by W.G. Sebald - review

Within a few years, and in four books — The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001) — W. G. Sebald achieved a reputation as a major international author. He was tipped for the Nobel, seen to supply heartening proof that ‘greatness in literature is still possible’ (John Banville) and that ‘literary greatness is still possible’ (Susan Sontag).

Literary greatness it seemed, at times, was Sebald, and for a while after the publication of The Rings of Saturn, it was hard to find a work of fictive non-fiction that wasn’t riddled with grainy photographs of dubious quality integrated into the text. Despite Sebald’s sudden death in 2001 his publishing career has continued — and he is now as prolific in death as he was in life, with works including On the Natural History of Destruction (2003), Unrecounted (2004), Campo Santo (2005) as well as two collections of poems, For Years Now (2001) and Across the Land and the Water (2012). This latest posthumous work, A Place in the Country, is a collection of essays on subjects including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike and Robert Walser, beautifully translated by Jo Catling, a former colleague of Sebald’s at UEA.

Certain words recur in critical appraisals of Sebald: ‘sublime’, ‘ghostly’, ‘melancholy’, ‘lugubrious’ and ‘sui generis’. He is credited with fashioning a ‘new form of the novel,’ a ‘new form of the travelogue’, a ‘new history’ and a ‘new literature’. Such tributes refer to Sebald’s tapestries of seemingly disparate events, his fluid cohesions of the past and present, real and unreal, living and dead. Catling opens her introduction with a telling quotation from Sebald’s essay on Walser:

I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death…