Carole Angier
To the Brink of Silence
Unrecounted: 33 Texts and 33 Etchings
By W G Sebald, Jan Peter Tripp (Trans Michael Hamburger)
Hamish Hamilton 103pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
THERE CAN BE few lovers of literature who do not know that W G Sebald died a few months after the publication of Austerlitz, at only fie-seven, and apparently at the height of his powers. Scholars of his work have known, however, that something more mysterious was happening.
Sebald's first non-academic work was a poem, After Nature. But After Nature was closer to prose than poetry, and proved to be closest of all to Sebald's own prose, which soon followed: a series of portraits strung on a long narrative line. This line grew steadily richer and more complex.
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