There is a new Sebald conference coming next month in Bavaria. Below is (more or less) a Google translation of the original German announcement, and the German original can be found immediately following the English version. Registration information is at the end. Original source: https://www.sebald-gesellschaft.de/natur-verantwortung-zerstoerung/.
“Nature, responsibility, destruction”: Facets of Nature Writing by Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. A conference of the German Sebald Society and the International Thomas Bernhard Society on the occasion of W.G. Sebald’s 80th Birthday. May 9-11, 2024 in Sonthofen, Germany.
Program:
Thursday, 9. May 2024
6 p.m.: Opening of the exhibition of Jan Peter Tripp in the StadtHausGalerie, Sonthofen.
Friday, 10. May 2024
10.00–10.30 a.m. Ricardo Felberbaum (Kempten) and Kay Wolfinger (LMU Munich): Welcome.
10.30–11.00: Claudia Öhlschläger (University of Paderborn) & Juliane Werner (University of Vienna): Nature Writing with Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald – Introduction.
Nature Writing as a research trend?
11.30–12.30 pm: Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta): German-language Nature Writing: Hidden Traditional Lines and New Paths.
Bernhard’s and Sebald’s Nature
14.00–15.00: Bernhard Judex (Literary Archive Salzburg): Fascination of the Uncanny. Some remarks on the concept of nature in Bernhard and Sebald.
3 pm–4 pm: Renate Langer (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg): A visit to The Lime Works. W.G. Sebald reads Thomas Bernhard.
4.30–5.30: Clemens Braun (University of Vienna): “Sometimes I mean when I look, everything is already dead.” Natural histories of destruction in Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch and W.G. Sebald.
Evening event
Berit Shine (Reykjavik): K.I. as Nature Writing? (online).
Reading with Sophia Klink (Munich): Kurilensee. (Shortlisted author for the W.-G.-Sebald-Literpreis 2022).
Saturday, 11. May 2024
10.00–11.00: Alexander Honold (University of Basel): Talk on the three walkers: Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Peter Handke.
Nature in tension between responsibility and destruction: positions of Contemporary literature after Sebald.
11.30–12.30: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL Berlin): Sebald’s insects.
14.00–15.00: Christof Hamann (University of Cologne): Catastrophic natural history. W.G. Sebald’s peripatetic ars memoria.
3 pm–6.00 pm: Rita Morrien (University of Paderborn): ‘Scorched Earth’ – Marion Poschmann’s marl border and W.G. Sebald’s The Alps in the Sea.
Evening event
7.30 pm: Reading with Christoph Ransmayr (Vienna).
18.00 Uhr: Eröffnung der Ausstellung von Jan Peter Tripp in der StadtHausGalerie Sonthofen
Freitag, 10. Mai 2024
10.00–10.30 Uhr: Ricardo Felberbaum (Kempten) und Kay Wolfinger (LMU München): Begrüßung
10.30–11.00 Uhr: Claudia Öhlschläger (Universität Paderborn), Juliane Werner (Universität Wien): Nature Writing bei Thomas Bernhard und W.G. Sebald – Einführung
Nature Writing als Forschungstrend?
11.30–12.30 Uhr: Gabriele Dürbeck (Universität Vechta): Deutschsprachiges Nature Writing: Verborgene Traditionslinien und neue Wege
Bernhards und Sebalds Natur
14.00–15.00 Uhr: Bernhard Judex (Literaturarchiv Salzburg): Faszination des Unheimlichen. Einige Bemerkungen zum Naturbegriff bei Bernhard und Sebald
15.00–16.00 Uhr: Renate Langer (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg): Ein Besuch im Kalkwerk. W.G. Sebald liest Thomas Bernhard
16.30–17.30 Uhr: Clemens Braun (Universität Wien): „Manchmal meine ich, wenn ich hinschaue, es sei alles schon tot.“ Naturgeschichten der Zerstörung bei Bernhard, Frisch und Sebald
Abendveranstaltung
Berit Glanz (Reykjavik): K.I. als Nature Writing? (online) Lesung mit Sophia Klink (München): Kurilensee (Shortlist W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis 2022)
Samstag, 11. Mai 2024
10.00–11.00 Uhr: Alexander Honold (Universität Basel): Gespräch der drei Gehenden (Bernhard, Sebald, Handke)
Natur im Spannungsfeld von Verantwortung und Zerstörung: Positionen der Gegenwartsliteratur nach Sebald
11.30–12.30 Uhr: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL Berlin): Sebalds Insekten
14.00–15.00 Uhr: Christof Hamann (Universität zu Köln): Katastrophische Naturgeschichte. W.G. Sebalds peripatetische ars memoria
15.00–16.00 Uhr: Rita Morrien (Universität Paderborn): ‚Verbrannte Erde‘ – Marion Poschmanns Mergelgrenze und W.G. Sebalds Die Alpen im Meer
I can’t believe it has been a month since I have posted anything here on Vertigo, but I have been traveling for half of that period. My daughter, who is an attorney, and I went to Japan together. This is something we have talked about for years. This was my fourth trip and her first. We went to Tokyo and then on to the art island of Naoshima, in the Inland Sea.
The cherry trees blossomed a week late this year, which meant they were at their best the day we arrived.
A very energetic young chef in Shinjuku drains the water from the noodles for our ramen.
Naoshima (population about 3,100) is known for its contemporary art museums, architecture, and public art. You’ve probably seen images of Yayoi Kusama’s iconic pumpkin sculptures photogenically placed at the island’s edges. You feel as if you aren’t allowed to get on the outgoing ferry if you haven’t photographed them.
Lower level: Artworks by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
People leave money on one of several stone cats as a donation to a Shinto shrine on Naoshima.
While we were traveling, I began reading Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian novel The Memory Police (Vintage, 2019), translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. One of the hot new books now (and one I will be reading next) is Percival Everett’s James, which is a remake of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim. The Memory Police is almost a remake of Anne Frank’s The Diary of Young Girl, with Anne being the person who hides someone in grave danger. The Memory Police presents us with an island where things routinely go missing and then are forgotten by the island’s inhabitants. One day photographs are gone, another day calendars disappear. But there are a handful of people who genetically resist forgetting and who still remember all of the disappeared things, and it is the role of the Memory Police to find these people and make them disappear. The book’s narrator is a young woman who writes novels and who suddenly has to hide her editor in a secret room in her house when the Memory Police come after him.
It’s an elegantly written book. Ogawa writes simply and with great precision. The narrator is a keen observer of the world around her, of the way the snow falls, about how she feels when she realizes that something has disappeared. I am only halfway through the book, but it is very compelling. It’s not clear yet if there is a pattern or a purpose to the disappearances of the various objects that the islanders are being made to forget. There is great tension over the arrests and disappearances of people caused by the Memory Police, who are reminiscent of of the Nazi’s SS in 1930s Germany or of many other governmental paramilitary wings. There is a very human tenderness between the narrator, her editor (who is married and whose wife has just delivered a son), and an old man who is the narrator’s confidante in helping keep the editor hidden. I can’t decide how this book is going to end, if, as in The Diary of a Young Girl, the Memory Police are tragically going to find the editor, or whether he will somehow escape.
Don Mee Choi’s newest book of poetry Mirror Nation opens on a bridge in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. The last spy swap between East and West Berlin is taking place on the Bridge of Spies, and Choi is watching her father, a photojournalist, move around the bridge photographing the event. He’s easy to spot because he’s wearing a white winter hat with its ear flaps down.
Mirror Nation is replete with bridges. There’s the Eisener Steg, a footbridge that crosses the Main River in Frankfurt, where Choi lived in the 1980s. There’s the Langenscheidtbrücke in Berlin, which features prominently in Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire. There’s the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which I just mentioned. In Korea, there are the Taedong Bridge in Pyongyang and the Hangang Bridge in Seoul. Choi lived near the latter and used to walk on it as a child. What she tells us at the outset of this book is that certain symbols, like these bridges or the Mercedes Benz advertising logo that she sees from her apartment window in Berlin, along with certain hours on the clock, can send her memory tumbling back in time. “Sometimes, the flow of time is reversed for no apparent reason,” and memories of grief return.
Written while living in Berlin (once a divided city, just as her native Korea remains a divided country), the main event of this book is the May 1980 Gwangju Massacre (as she calls it) or Uprising, when hundreds, if not thousands of students and civilians were killed by Korean soldiers after the newly-installed South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan implemented martial law (with the full backing of the U.S. government). Thousands more were arrested and tortured. This event is threaded amongst moments plucked from Choi’s autobiography along with some free-form writing on a handful of topics like memory, angels, and time. Mirror Nation is the concluding volume of her trilogy of books that use both poetry and prose written in English and Korean, along with a somewhat adventurous use of type fonts, photographs, and other types of imagery. Collectively, the trilogy addresses Korean history during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, racism, and the legacy of the Korean War and subsequent American involvement in Korea. These books are part autobiography, part activism, and part “disobeying history,” as she says in Hardly War. In Seattle’s Wave Books, she’s found a publisher that gives her the design freedom to present her hybrid form of text/image to its best advantage.
Choi’s father, a photojournalist, photographed and filmed events throughout the days of the Gwangju Uprising and Choi herself turned eighteen only months afterward. Eventually, the family emigrated, splitting up between Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United States. Years later, her father related to her at length the frightening days he spent dodging soldiers as he photographed the clashes between protesters and government troops, documenting the dead and wounded. Several of his photographs are reproduced in the book, including a powerful sequence of full-page images. Also included in the book are several once-secret U.S. government documents demonstrating how American diplomats blamed Korean students for the protests and urged the Korean government to use violent force to put down the uprising.
Choi began this trilogy in 2016 with Hardly War, a bravura example of poetry and visual performance that more or less focused on the Korean War, although Choi’s books are never about just one thing. In 2018, DMZ Colony won the National Book Award. Its central theme was the succession of corrupt South Korean governments and the violence they have perpetrated on their own people, both before and after the Korean War. “How does this happen?” she asks. After Korea had been colonized by Japan and “neo-colonized by the US military machine,” it was easy. All the Korean regime needed was language to turn protesters into enemies of the state. “Not difficult to see each other as ‘scums of society,’ ‘commies.'”
Throughout the new book, Choi pays homage to other writers and artists who have influenced her work and Mirror Nation in particular. She quotes W.G. Sebald on “the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries” (Vertigo). There are references to Fritz Fanon, for his writings on post-colonialism, and to W.E.B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., who studied in Berlin in the 1890s. Walter Benjamin is invoked, of course, since Choi clearly abides by his belief of involuntary memories. But the presiding figures that hover over this book are the angels from Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire, his love letter to Berlin and to the angels that watch over that city.
Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire
After three books of war, incredible violence, and a family scattered across the globe, Choi, at the end of Mirror Nation, understands that she, too, is a divided country, a political person and a family person, one person who is consumed with history and grief and another person who stops to marvel at sparrows and swans. “While filming wars,” “[my father] said my sister and I often flashed before his eyes/we were a panorama of sparrows under Mother’s umbrella.”
Choi’s politically engaged, plurilingual, autobiographical, illustrated, and typographically bold trilogy is the worthy successor to her fellow countrywomen Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s now classic book Dictee(1982), which is frequently called a “masterpiece” by reviewers. In terms of their construction, Choi’s books are more complex than Dictee. Reading Choi’s trilogy is like watching a juggler tossing up a plate and an apple and several other odd objects, one of which is a very sharp knife, as our emotions shift from horror to tension to laughter. She can take the reader from anger to childlike silliness over the course of a page or two. Like Dictee, each of Choi’s three books are meant to be considered as a whole, not as a collection of individual poems. This lets her set up a body of references that continually bounce off of each other throughout each volume and throughout the trilogy, giving the reader the kind of complexity and depth that is often only found in novels.
Choi seems to need to use a wide range of modes—to write in poetry and in paragraphs, to write in English and in Korean, to use images. Hardly War even includes a short play, complete with chorus. I think this is how she lets her divided self, her multi-sided-self, speak—her partisan self, her angry and persistent historian self, her family self, and the part of her that is still childlike. In this powerful and moving trilogy, she has turned a poetic mirror not only on Korea, but also on herself.
“The list of Anglophone writers who bear a real or critically imposed debt to the German W. G. Sebald feels endless and has been repeated to the point of tedium.” More than two decades after Sebald’s death, reviewers, literary critics, and bloggers (including this one) are still labeling writers “Sebaldian,” writers who, for the most part, nearly all use the English language. “Yet Sebaldianism has not only been a phenomenon within Anglophone letters,” writes Federico Perelmuter in an essay “Sebald and His Precursors” in the latest issue of the Southwest Review. “In fact, the intensity of Sebald’s reception in Latin American literature since the late 1990s has been at least equally notable, not least because of the intensely political undertones that Sebald’s followers in the region have given their work.” Perelmuter proceeds to name some twenty Latin American writers and three from Spain—all writing in Spanish—who have been “among Sebald’s most devoted readers.”
Perelmuter first writes about some of the reasons that Sebald’s books found a welcoming audience in Latin America. Then, he turns to the topic indicated by the title of his piece.
What a US reader might recognize as the “Sebaldian” has existed, in one way or another, in Latin American literature since about 1493. Indeed, the contestatary first-person historical novel/memoir has been a central genre in the region since what many regard as the first Latin American novel, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s 1568 The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. In that book, written when Hernán Cortés’s former underling was nearing death and suffering from a guilty conscience, the atrocities and tragedies of the Mexican conquest came to life. . . From Magellan’s journals to the Araucanato Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle to Domingo Sarmiento’s semi-fictionalized biography Facundo, Latin America has—pardon my French—always already been Sebaldian.
Perelmuter’s essay is a valuable contribution to the discussion about Sebald’s influence. But, more importantly, it’s just a fabulous essay about literature, and it gave me the names of several new writers whose books I’m anxious to read.
By the way, I have written more than once about two of the writers that play important roles in Perelmuter’s essay. I’ve written about four books by Ricardo Piglia and three books by Sergio Chejfec, both of whom were Argentinian writers.
This is the second of four posts on W.G. Sebald in Context, which came out last September. It contains thirty-eight essays on Sebald by specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East, and the United States. The volume was edited by Uwe Schütte, who studied under Sebald, knew him well, and is now widely recognized as one of the most respected Sebald scholars. If you are interested in Sebald at all, this is an important book that succinctly covers nearly every aspect of his life, career, and writings. It’s a terrific starting point to learn more about Sebald, since the writing is very accessible and the essays are short, as each was limited to 3,500 words. The volume is divided into four sections: Biographical Aspects, The Literary Works, Themes and Influences, and Reception and Legacy. The second section consists of nine essays covering Sebald’s Literary Works.
8. Melissa Etzler covers the handful of Sebald’s surviving unpublished juvenilia, which includes several very short stories, a six-page play, and an unpublished novel. These works from the 1960s “foreshadow the philosophical, historical and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction,” Etzler writes.
9. Many Sebald readers might be surprised to learn that some of his first serious writing projects were two film scripts about the lives of philosophers—one on Immanuel Kant, the other on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although both were left unfinished and unproduced, Michael Hutchins says they “bear the same thematic and aesthetic imprint as his later work.” These were Sebald’s earliest attempts to find and fund a life outside of academia, which he was finding “extremely unpleasant” under the increased bureaucracy placed on universities by the government of Margaret Thatcher. (Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until his death in 2001.)
10. The year 1986 seems to have marked a “fresh and decisive departure in Sebald’s oeuvre,” according to Paul Whitehead, who writes about his Prose Project. According to a grant application that he had submitted in February 1987, Sebald had already begun work on the book that would become Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo) in 1990, his first published book of prose fiction. Parts of this Prose Project, as Sebald called it, were also split off to become the germ of his next book, Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), published in 1992.
11. Nearly all Sebald’s books involve the writing of a biography or some aspect of his own autobiography. Christopher Singer examines how Sebald “complicates” this tendency toward Auto-/Biography by “merging fact and fiction, author- and narrative personas, memory and history, past and present.”
12. “One of the enduring intellectual appeals of his work twenty years after his untimely death is related to the rigour with which he renders ecological disasters as a literary theme.” Bernhard Malkmus explores the various ways in which Sebald uses Natural History and the Anthropocene in his books.
13. In 1995 and 1996, Sebald traveled to the French island of Corsica in the Mediterranean for research, and he began writing on his Corsica Project. But only a year later, he mysteriously stopped working on it. In the manuscript that he left behind, he wrote that he believed that Corsicans lived as though they were “pervaded through and through by the fear of death.” Lisa Kunze believes that “the rationale for this fear is firstly that, on Corsica, the landscape is steeped in the reality of nature’s formidable force. [Sebald’s] narrator becomes personally aware of this on his repeated hiking excursions across the island; it is the ‘fear of abandonment in the world’ and the ‘suspicion that one cannot do the slightest thing against the known quality of nature’.”
14. Sebald “wrote and published poetry from his early twenties until shortly before his death.” Iain Galbraith looks at the themes of his poetry: “history, nature, destruction, the Holocaust, landscapes, time, the gaze, memory, surfaces, texts, borders, journeys (mostly by train), half-way or inconclusive states, concealed orders, hearsay, astrology, arcane signs and symbols, myth and legend, and, perhaps most conspicuous of all, absences.”
15. In 2000, Sebald applied for and received a United Kingdom-funded grant to undertake a World War Project. Before his death, he had already traveled to France and Germany doing research for what he wrote would be a work of “semi-documentary prose fiction.” Richard Hibbit has studied the research files and manuscripts that remain and writes that Sebald had researched European conflicts from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Second World War., in which his father served as a German soldier in Poland.
16. “From 1990 onwards, [Sebald] was a willing interviewee and, as a writer, gave over eighty interviews for television, radio, journals and newspapers in both German and English.” Torsten Hoffmann gives a fascinating report on what can be gleaned from these interviews. He finds that Sebald can be “very candid,” but could also fall into “storytelling.” In other words, read, watch, or listen to an interview with Sebald “with the same serious approach” that you would read one of his books of prose fiction.
W.G. Sebald in Context is part of Cambridge University Press’ Literature in Context series, which now numbers more than seventy volumes, offering “comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.” I’ve already covered the section Biographical Aspects.
“Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the uncanny resemblance between his two wives.”
Cracking open Gabriel Josipovici’s novel The Cemetery in Barnes (Carcanet, 2018), we are immediately ushered into a world of ambiguity, confusion, and repetition, even though it’s a simple story of a man and his two wives (none of whom is given a name). He works as a professional translator with a penchant for sixteenth century French poetry. He is especially a fan of the The Regrets, a collection of sonnets by Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560). “The title had immediately struck a chord in him. There was so much to regret.” He is also very much “a creature of habit,” a man who enjoys his daily routines. “He always made a point of leaving and returning to the flat in the same manner. Sixty-seven steps, he would say. He had got to know them so well, could, after a while, have gone up or down them blindfold.” Throughout the novel, the descriptions of the man’s three residences and his two wives often seem to be so similar that the reader can momentarily get confused. Is this London, Paris, or Wales? Is this the first wife or the second? More ominously, certain events seem to recur, with different outcomes each time.
He and his first wife, who is described as “a trainee solicitor and amateur violinist,” had lived in London. On occasion, he would secretly observe her as she exited the tube station near their house coming home from work, and he would follow her home from a distance. “It moved him to see her like this, from the outside, as it were, a young woman with a light step and straight fair-to-reddish hair.” In fact, the translator never felt as if he really knew either of his two wives. Here he is again, thinking of his first wife. “He felt at times as if he did not understand her at all. She was there and yet she was not there. He held her and yet he did not hold her. As they walked, hand in hand, he sometimes felt as if he was walking with a stranger.”
On weekends, he and his first wife liked to walk along the Thames. The circumstances that lead up to her death are told three times. In the first instance, the couple were walking along the Thames when she seemed to slip, or perhaps “the bank seemed to crumble beneath her feet.” Fortunately, she was a strong swimmer and she found a place to scramble up out of the river and the two walked safely home. In the second telling, she fell into the Thames after the two have had an argument. But then she developed an ominous cough which didn’t go away despite a round of antibiotics and we aren’t told what happens to her. In the third telling, his wife drowned, after which the translator was questioned about the incident by the police.
What did you do then? they asked at the police station when he reported it. I sat down, he said. You sat down? Yes. What do you mean, you sat down? I sat down and waited for her to reappear. You didn’t think of jumping in after her? No, he said. Why not? I don’t know. Try to remember, they said. I told you, he said after a while. I thought she would reappear. But when she didn’t? I didn’t know where she was. What do you mean you didn’t know where she was? I didn’t know where to jump in. She might have swum under water. Or the current might have carried her. So what did you do? I came here.
After the death of his first wife, he moved to Paris, where he lived in a “small apartment at the top of a peeling building in the rue Lucrèce, behind the Pantheon.” To get to it, he had to climb the steep flight of sixty-seven steps (that I mentioned earlier) out of rue Saint-Julien. This was his haven, where he could see the dome of the Pantheon from the window near his desk where he unfailingly worked every weekday from 7:15 AM until 4:00 PM, stopping for a two-hour break at 11:00. When he remarried, he and his second wife moved to a restored farmhouse in the mountains of Wales. His second wife was made well aware that she was no match for her husband’s knowledge and interests, and so she was always explaining to their dinner guests how much he had to teach her after they were married. “He had to teach me that a Baroque suite was not something elaborate you served at the end of a meal, she would say.” And he would always respond to her: “You had other qualities.”
But apparently, his second wife and one of their frequent dinner guests—a civil servant—began to get a little too personal when they were alone in the kitchen, and the civil servant’s wife finally cornered the translator and spoke up.
Look at them! she hissed. It’s disgusting! What is? he asked? The way they carry on. I’m sorry? Anyone can see what’s going on. I’m afraid I don’t follow you, he said. You know, she said, looking him full in the face, that’s exactly what it is: you are afraid. He tried to move away but she followed and pinned him to the bookcase. Do something about it! she hissed. You understand? Please, he said. Because if you don’t I will.
Standing on the frozen garden he watched the flames rise into the night sky and listened to the roar of the fire as it devoured the wooden beams, mingled with the hiss of the ineffectual jets of water the firemen were still pumping into the rapidly disintegrating building.
In this telling of the fire, the house in Wales was destroyed, although his second wife survived. But a few pages later Josipovici seems to be giving us a different version of the aftermath of the fire. We see the translator apparently leaving the local morgue. “He could not believe that the charred bodies he was shown had once been living people. He could not recognise the other corpse they had dragged from the burning house. On his way out he saw Mabel, but she pretended not to see him and he for his part had nothing to say to her.” This is the only time in which a character in the book is named—Mabel, who must be the wife of the civil servant. Did she or the translator deliberately set the house of fire which killed his wife and the civil servant? We aren’t told.
One of the most beguiling things about Josipovici’s prose in The Cemetery in Barnes is his narrator’s quirky voice. Just like the main character, the narrator is also a person “of habit,” repeating the same phrases throughout the book. Take the opening paragraph, for example. It’s only two sentence long: “He had been living in Paris for many years. Longer, he used to say, than he cared to remember.” That little tossed off clause, “he used to say,” is a subtle way of suggesting to us that the translator has a habit of saying the same thing repetitively. But it’s just the first of literally hundreds of times that the narrator will use this or a similar phrase. On the first page alone, the narrator uses the phrases “he would explain” and then “he would say” a total of three times. “At my age, he would say, it’s too late to change.” Scarcely a paragraph in the book goes by without the narrator using one of these variants.
When I first wrote about this book in 2018, I tended to focus on the novel as “a maze, a Möbius loop, a multiverse.” In this reading, I thought much more about the character of the translator, a man who might be a double murderer or who might just have an overactive imagination. After the apparent death of his second wife and her lover, the final pages of the novel are occupied with the translator’s reminiscences of his days in London and in Paris. “As is the way with the imagination, thinking frequently and long enough about something makes it seem at first possible, then even probable, and, finally, necessary.” He thinks about his two wives and he remembers some of the sixteenth century poetry that has always sustained him. And then on the last page he recalls something he said to his second wife earlier in the book: “One sprouts so many lives, he would say, and look at her and smile. One is a murderer. One an incendiary. One a suicide. One lives in London. One in Paris. One in New York.” Then the book ends with him where he once lived on the rue Saint Julien in Paris. Or perhaps he never left Paris at all and the two wives were just figments of his imagination. At this point, we don’t quite know what to believe.
What I had not paid attention to in the first reading were the poems and the music of the sixteenth century which he adored and how they set a tone of regret that reflected directly on his two marriages. He’s a man who married twice, but who, deep inside, wants to be left alone.
The Cemetery in Barnes, like nearly all of Josipovici’s fictions, is a novel that reminds us how easy it would be for a life to have gone in many different directions and how one’s memories and one’s imagination are essentially interchangeable.
By the way, the real Barnes Cemetery in Putney, where the translator and his first wife lived (and presumably where she was buried), has a fascinating history.
This is book number 9 in my Vertigo 15 Books Project, in which I am looking back across fifteen years of my reading and writing Vertigo and I am selecting the fifteen titles that have really stood out during that time.
W.G. Sebald in Context came out last September with thirty-eight essays on the writer by thirty-eight different authors (including myself). The writers are a who’s who of Sebald specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East, and the United States. The editor, Uwe Schütte, studied under Sebald, knew him well, and is now widely recognized as one of the most respected Sebald scholars. If you are interested in Sebald at all, this is an important book that succinctly covers nearly every aspect of his life, career, and writings. It’s a terrific starting point to learn more about Sebald, especially since the writing is very accessible. The essays are short, as each was limited to 3,500 words. The volume is divided into four sections: Biographical Aspects, The Literary Works, Themes and Influences, and Reception and Legacy, and over the next month or so I will write up a brief synopsis of the essays for each of these. The first section of seven essays covers the Biographical Aspects of Sebald’s life.
1. Kay Wolfinger writes about Sebald’s ambiguous feelings about Allgäu, Germany, the place of his childhood, and his complex feelings about the idea of heimat, or the sense of having a German homeland.
2. Christoph Steker writes about the key person in Sebald’s childhood, his grandfather Josef Egelhofer. His grandfather became a father figure to him because Sebald’s own father was frequently absent and had become tainted in his eyes due to his service as a German soldier who had served in Poland during World War II. Josef introduced Sebald to some of the key German authors who he would write about later on, and Sebald came to link the image of his grandfather with the important German writer Robert Walser, since he felt they were very similar in several important ways. Steker suggests that the death of his grandfather when Sebald was twelve was the “original trauma” for the young boy.
3. Catherine Annabel explores the impact that the city of Manchester had on Sebald when he came to teach there in 1966. He was totally unprepared for a city so degraded by industrialization. Michel Butor, who had preceded Sebald as a young lecturer at the University of Manchester, wrote L’Emploi du Temps (Passing Time) in 1956, a novel that greatly influenced the works that Sebald wrote about that dealt with Manchester—the “Bleston” poems, the book-long poem Nach der Natur, and the “Max Ferber” section of The Emigrants.
4. Jo Catling examines the extent to which real East Anglia, a part of England that seems to be “at the end of the world,” matches the East Anglia that appears in Sebald’s books.
5. Florian Radvan writes about Sebald’s difficult relationship with German academia throughout his life. From the beginnings of his university career, Sebald seemed determined to rebel against the conservative German academic establishment, which he felt had “swept under the carpet” the recent German past. Radvan describes Sebald’s MA dissertation as full of “controversial theories [that] consciously sought to antagonize,” marking him as an “academic enfant terrible” and thus making him unwelcome in German academia. As a result, Sebald took up a series of teaching positions in English universities, finally settling into the University of East Anglia, where he taught until his death.
6. Duncan Large writes about the British Centre for Literary Translation, which Sebald founded in 1989 at the University of East Anglia. Three years later, Sebald’s dean said that it was “the most successful applied humanities venture the university has known.” The Centre continues to operate today.
7. Sebald, a German who spent his entire professional life living and working in England, inhabited—a “no man’s land of the in-between,” according to Rüdiger Görner. In his essay Between Germany and Britain, Görner muses on the odd position in which Sebald deliberately placed himself when he emigrated to England yet continued to write almost exclusively in German. In the end, Görner suggests, this state enabled Sebald “to penetrate the [German] past without being overwhelmed by it.”
W.G. Sebald in Context is part of Cambridge University Press’ Literature in Context series, which now numbers more than seventy volumes, offering “comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.”
In her new book We the Parasites, from Sublunary Editions, the critic, essayist, and art historian A.V. Marraccini really stages an entrance. She begins by explaining the pollination of figs by female wasps. It’s a form of parasitism called mutualism, Marraccini tells us, “because the fig and the wasp need each other to produce.” But on occasion, instead of pollinating the fig, the female wasp crawls into a female fig and dies there, only to be “absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig.”
“I’m the wasp,” Marraccini declares on the next page, “I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architecture, and I make them my own. I write criticism.”
The critical gaze is also erotic; we want things, we are by a degree of separation pollinating figs with other figs by means of our wasp bodies, rubbing two novels together like children who make two dolls “have sex,” except we’ll die inside the fruit and someone else will read it and eat it, rich with all the juices of my corpse. This is an odd but sensuous thing to want. And though the male-female figs exist, and the male-female wasps, the whole process, the generative third body in the dark recesses of the inverted flower, is somehow queer. Criticism, too, is somehow queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge.
And so, three pages into her book, Marraccini has let the reader know that there is a completely new kind of critic in town. We the Parasites reads a bit like a chatty but erudite essay that revels in the world of usually unwelcome creatures. She talks about her morning coffee and her London walks, she rants about one of her previous university professors (her Chiron), and she lets us in on her hopes for a transatlantic love affair (the Girl from Across the Sea). But she also happily name drops and quotes from the ancients, including Aristotle, Theocritus, Homer, and a half dozen others. (Let’s just say that it quickly becomes clear that she really knows her way around the ancient Greek and Roman world and medieval European history). What Marraccini does in this book is elucidate her critical platform, so to speak, and then give us some demonstrations of her work in action. Her primary interests here are the poets W.H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke and the artist Cy Twombly, especially several paintings he made which have, not surprisingly, themes based in the ancient world: The Age of Alexander, 1959-60, and the ten-part painting Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978.
What becomes clear very quickly is that there is no protective wall between her professional life and her personal life. When she walks through the park, thinks about a girlfriend, or basically does any daily activity, she thinks about the ancient writers and she thinks about poets and painters. And when she reads poetry or looks at art, she thinks about the people she knows and her memories of childhood. “I see The Age of Alexander when I close my eyes at night now, and when I am out in the small hours, supposedly running.” When she watches a Spanish heist show on Netflix, she thinks of The Age of Alexander. When her doctor advises that she take iron supplements, she thinks of Hesiod, who lived in the Iron Age. I can’t think of another critic offhand other than Gabriel Josipovici whose first instinct upon dealing with the modern is to think about the ancients.
“I cannot write a disinterested review,” Marraccini wrote in a piece about Marina Abramovic at Hyperallergic. As she fleshes out her critical platform, she vectors for us the kinds of things that interest her, and establishes an ideological DNA strand for her writing. And she makes clear that she cannot and will not remove the personal from the critical. This is why so many of the pieces of writing listed on her c.v. are essentially essays.
She also wants us to know that she can be a “bad girl” type of critic. (More than once she made me think of the British artist Tracey Emin, who makes frank, confessional art about her body, her love life, and, currently, her health.) “One of my bosses told me yesterday that if I wanted him to promote me for jobs in the academy. . . I was supposed to be NICE. . . This command of niceness, of course, instead, made me want to be disgusting, untouchable, speaking dark argots in corners slick with grime.”
I grow prolix and long with sacs full of eggs, made from the nutrient slop of everything I see and hear and read. I wag my body, my segments, and it is a tongue and these are its words, asshole words I have stolen like a petty thief, words I cherish because they are not agreeable, but somehow wretched and ready to disseminate and breed.
As the title suggests, the book is filled with references to parasites, tapeworms, mosquitoes, ticks, and a host of illnesses. Marraccini is attracted to the things that gross most people out, and she uses that to great effect, somewhat in the style of the transgressive American filmmaker John Waters.
In the final part of We the Parasites, Marraccini puts it all together for us and gives us an extended essay that draws on Twombly’s painting The Shield of Achilles from the series Fifty Days at Iliam, Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” and the eighteenth book of The Iliad, which is mostly an ekphrastic description of Achilles’ shield. From these works, she writes about the confusion of rage, love, and sorrow that afflicts Achilles after Hector kills his close friend Patroclus in battle and strips him of the armor that Achilles had lent his friend. Before returning to the battle where he will avenge Patroclus’s death by killing Hector, the god Hephaestus provides Achilles with a stunningly decorated new shield.
Achilles’ Shield, as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, from Le Costume Ancien ou Moderne, ca. 1820.
She may have titled her book We the Parasites, but Marraccini is clearly one of a kind. Last fall, she took up the position as critic in residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Media, NYU Tandon, in Brooklyn. In August, 2023, she wrote about returning to America after years of living abroad. “I am coming back to America partly because of the art criticism I write about NFTs. Are you ready to hate me yet?” I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the critic who loves parasites and the ancient world should be fascinated with non-fungible tokens, those oh-so dubious bad boys of the ultra-contemporary art world. This is a short book of only 139 pages, but each page gave me so much to think about. After a second and a third reading, I think my brain has been subtly rewired.
Photo-embedded literature—novels and books of poetry which use photographs as an essential element of the “text”—is a core interest of mine and is something I have written about extensively on this blog since I began it in 2007. In 2023, I managed to see or be informed about a small number of newly published examples of photo-embedded literature by writers from Australia, England, Norway, and the United States.
This preliminary listing for 2023 adds to my extensive bibliography of hundreds of such books for the years from 1892 to the present which can be found at the pull-down menu Photo-Embedded Literature at the top of Vertigo. If you know of a book of photo-embedded fiction or poetry that I have not listed yet from 2023 or any other year, please let me know in a comment anywhere on Vertigo. My thanks to the many readers who have already pointed me to books that I had not known about.
Douglas Bruton. With or Without Angels. Oxford: Fairlight Books, 2023. Bruton’s novel was written in response to a series of eleven color photographs that he saw by the late Scottish artist Alan Smith. That series, “The New World (after Giandomenico Tiepolo),” 2015, was, in turn, a response to Tiepolo’s detached fresco “Il Mondo Nuovo,” 1791, now housed in Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice. Tiepolo’s strange painting (shown above) depicts a crowd of people with their backs turned to us while they look at an event we cannot see. Bruton’s novel is the imaginative reconstruction of how Smith, his wife, and his muse/model Livvy went about creating the series of staged and digitally collaged series of photographs, which were made at the very same time that Smith’s memory was fading and his fatal cancer advancing.
Helen Cammock. I Will Keep My Soul. Siglio, 2023. This book was “occasioned by” the exhibition of the same title, curated by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. The book and the exhibition celebrate New Orleans and are the result of the artist’s research and residency at the the Amistad Research Center there. This comes very close to being an artist’s book (which I normally exclude from listing here), but it feels important enough to include. It includes poetry, photographs, and collages of historical material by Cammock, a story by Kristina Kay Robinson, two essays, and an excerpt from an interview. Of special note is Cammock’s use of the Center’s Elizabeth Catlett Archive and documentary material relating to Catlett’s commission to create a sculpture of Louis Armstrong in the Algiers section of the city. Cammock is British with English and Jamaican heritage. She was a co-winner of the 2019 Turner Prize.
Joshua Edwards. My First Vision Was of Gabriel Standing in a Fire. Chicago: The Economy Press, 2023. This is a new twist on the tradition of “found poetry.” Poet & photographer Joshua Edwards has created a group of ten-word photo-poems. Each poem consists of words that he saw and photographed during long walks in New York City. Each poem was then made into a totem-like image of the ten words stacked on top of each other. Edwards refers to his ten-word poems as “cortinas” for a variety of reasons that seem to him “relevant to the vocation or curse of poetry.”
James Elkins. Weak in Comparison to Dreams. Los Angeles: Unnamed Press, 2023. The first thing you notice about this 600-page novel is that it is stuffed with b&w photographs, charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages containing sections of musical scores. Elkin’s novel is a tragic story of a man who cannot solve the problems he identifies. It’s a novel about failure, empathy, memory, and loneliness. But it also has a clarity of purpose and a sense of confidence that makes it often exhilarating to read. I wrote at some length about it here.
Tristan Foster and Michelle Lynn Dyrness. Midnight Grotesques. Seattle: Sublunary Editions, 2023. Mysterious page-long stories? prose poems? by Foster paired with nearly abstract color photographs by Dyrness. The stunningly beautiful images seem to be of falling, blurry rocks and torn images of faces, objects playfully “cataloged” as if for a museum collection. The texts are meditative, lyrical pieces that might be very private, meandering letters to or conversations with a lover. The texts start out as abstract as the images, but end up expressing pure awe at simply being alive. A wonderful object in itself, Midnight Grotesques defies categories.
Catherine Lacey. Biography of X. NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023. When the genre-defying, cult artist X dies suddenly, her wife, CM, impulsively decides to write her biography, unaware that she is about to open herself up to a seemingly endless array of surprises and damaging discoveries as she tracks down the hidden life story of her deceased wife. Lacey has provided an impressively (perhaps obsessively) detailed biography for X, laden with photographs that “document” her life.
Daniel Mason. North Woods. NY: Random House, 2023. Mason’s novel about the changing nature of a small section of forest over several centuries contains poems, photographs, paintings, music scores, pages of almanacs and more. The photographs are mostly credited to well-known collections and institutional libraries.
Alice McDermott. Absolution. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. According to a review in The New York Review (Feb. 8, 2024), McDermott’s novel about American wives who have accompanied their husbands to pre-war Vietnam in the early 1960s contains at least one photograph (of “a happy-looking American family”).
James Morrison. Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing after Another. Alberta: Orbis Tertius Press, 2023. “The discontinuous narrative of an Australian family” told in a series of short stories. Each story is preceded by a full-page illustration by the author, at least one utilizing a photograph.
Timothy O’Grady, author, & Steve Pyke, photographer. I Could Read the Sky. London: Unbound, 2023. A reissue of a highly regarded 1997 novel (published by The Harvill Press) of a modern Irish migrant’s life in England. He works at any heavy labor job he can get, but it’s also a love story. “There was a future that flickered and darkened whenever I tried to look at it. Then without warning there was Maggie and there was light and there was a road ahead to receive us.” This reissue contains the original preface by John Berger. The press release says this edition has been “redesigned” and includes “many-never-before seen photographs.” The b&w photographs, many of which are portraits, are emotionally powerful photojournalist-style images. I wrote more about the book here.
Gunnhild Øyehaug. Evil Flowers. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023. Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. Stories somewhat inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (first published in 1857). The book contains a photograph of Baudelaire staring at the title story, as well as a stock photograph of a feather.
Kimberly Reyes. Vanishing Point. Oakland: Omnidawn, 2023. This is perhaps a stretch from the concept of “embedding” photographs in the book of poetry, but this is the first time I have encountered QR codes in a poetry volume. The QR codes send the reader to YouTube films that that I found stunning both as short films and as spoken poems. The films can be seen on her website. Reyes’ book also includes reproductions of artworks and a page from the 1920 census.
Kim Roberts & Robert Revere. Corona/Crown. Cincinnati: WordTech Editions, 2023. Poems by Roberts & photographs (both b&w and color) by Revere. Both the poems and the photographs deal with the act of looking and the experience of visiting museums. But Robert’s and Revere’s joint project was born of the corona virus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, which closed museums worldwide. In the chapbook, Roberts uses the tradition of sonnet crowns, in which the final phrase of one section becomes the opening phrase of the next section, in part because “crown” in Italian is “corona.” Revere’s images are of art, people looking at art, or museums.
Stanley Schtinter. Last Movies (A book of endings). London: Tenement Press, 2023. A century of cinema history is told through Schtinter’s imaginative and fictional descriptions of the last film supposedly seen by a number of famous people just before they died, included Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy, Franz Kafka, Elvis Presley, and Kurt Cobain. Included with each film is a film still reproduced upside down, “indicative of what the book is doing with history,” the author said in The Guardian.
Christina Sharpe. Ordinary Notes. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023. Sharpe’s book contains 248 “notes” that read as prose poems. Scattered throughout are images, about half are photographs and the other half are reproductions of works of art. Many of the photographs are credited to the author. Most of the “notes” have been quoted or adapted from other sources, ranging from Toni Morrison to the New York Times. The “notes” format has been influenced by Dionne Brand’s iconic book of poetry The Blue Clerk (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 2018).
Bennett Sims. Other Minds and Other Stories. Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, 2023. Amongst Sims’ dozen stories are five photographs, one of which is by the author’s mother (and from which a magnified detail is extracted and shown several pages later). Sims seems to have tapped into today’s zeitgeist, with stories that push things like car GPS systems and cellphones into a realm vaguely like “The Twilight Zone,” while other stories read like edgy non-fiction. The writing is precise, never fussy, and taps into a vocabulary that will exercise most brains. I’m still reading the book, but I may never forget his story “Pecking Order,” in which a suburban backyard farmer tries to kill one of his chickens with a very dull set of hedge clippers.
Patricia Smith.Unshuttered. Evanston: Triquarterly Books, 2023. Smith has been collecting nineteenth century photographs of African Americans for several decades. In Unshuttered, Smith’s poems create stories and situations for forty-two of these images, which are beautifully reproduced.
Justin Torres. Blackouts. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. It seems impossible to briefly describe this National Book Award winner, which uses a wild array of photographs and other types of illustrations as part of its complexly layered storytelling process about, well, storytelling. It’s a strange and sometimes wondrous novel that largely concerns a conversation between Juan, a young, gay Puerto Rican, and Nene, an elderly gay man who is dying. The setting is a mysterious care facility or lodging in the desert called The Palace. The two tell each other stories, with Nene acting somewhat as Juan’s mentor in life. The stories are about gay life and gay history, many of which focus on the oppression and marginalization of gays (and of Latinos). One primary (true) story that Nene tells is that of Jan Gay, a largely unknown woman who conducted some of the earliest methodical interviews with hundreds of lesbian women. Blackouts is full of photographs, illustrations, and pages from books about “sex variants” with most of the words blacked out and the remaining words forming a prose poem. The book is very conversational that skips around frequently from topic to topic, leaving some conversations unfinished.
B.R. Yeager. Burn You the Fuck Alive. Philadelphia: Apocalypse Party, 2023. Stories with some images, some of which are photographic in origin. I have only seen the sample available on Amazon.
A conference on W.G. Sebald will be held on Friday January 19, 2024 at at Göttingen University. Organized by Sebald scholar Uwe Schütte and Katerina Kroucheva, it is called “Zerstörerische Naturgeschichte und unheimliche Wiederkehr: A Memorial Conference in Honour of W.G. Sebald.” (Roughly translated as “Destructive Natural History and Uncanny Return: A Memorial Conference in Honor of W.G. Sebald.”) The conference will help launch the recently published book W.G. Sebald in Context (Cambridge University Press). It is is free to attend. No registration is needed, just show up. For further information, contact co-organizer Katerina Kroucheva (kroucheva@phil.uni-goettingen.de). Here is the planned schedule. (The title of each presentation is in the language that will be used by the speaker.)
9.15 am Uwe Schütte (Berlin/Göttingen) Willkommen / Einführung
9.30 am Rüdiger Görner (London) Der lange Atem des W.G. Sebald. Eine Anmutung
10.15 am Lothar Müller (Berlin) Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich. W.G. Sebald, der Satzbau und die Geschichte der deutschen Erzählprosa
11.00 am Reinhard Pabst (Montabaur) Halberstadt revisited. Sebald and Kluge
11.45 am Discussion
12.30 pm Lunch
1.30 pm Iain Galbraith (Wiesbaden) On W.G. Sebaldʼs Poetry
I began Vertigo in 2007 primarily as a vehicle for writing about W.G. Sebald and the history of fiction and poetry with photographs embedded as part of the author’s original text. I now write about a broader range of books that interest me. You can see my 11 favorite posts (from more than 600) by clicking on the Top Posts tab. And check out my yearly Reading Log, where I write something about every book I read. The categories below are only a handful of the topics covered in this blog over the years. Please use the Search field below to see if an author, book, or topic has been mentioned or discussed. To contact me, just leave a comment at any post and I will answer. Enjoy! Terry
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