Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 100

For years now

I've had this
whistling
sound in
my ears

- WG Sebald

from 'Letters to a Translator'

There are many more modes of the past than those allowed by Imperfect, Perfect & Pluperfect!

I racked my brain for a better way of rendering "Wehswirtschaft" (p.14), but not to much avail.

I haven't had proofs from "Sprache im technischen Zeitalter" (what a stupid name for a journal)...

- WG Sebald, 'Letters to a Translator' in Little Star 5 (2014)

Facebooks - V

Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions - Martin Amis
The Cripple of Inishmaan - Martin McDonagh
Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler [abandoned]
'The Book of Emma' [in Small Hours] - Lachlan Mackinnon
The Psalms - 'David'
Markings - Dag Hammarskjöld (transl. WH Auden)
Rorke's Drift - James Bancroft [I think; but possibly another work.             They all look the same] / The Day of the Dead Moon - David Rattray     [audiobook]
Three Men in a Boat / on the Bummel - Jerome K Jerome
Vertigo - WG Sebald
Lost Oasis: A Desert Adventure - Robert Twigger

Books I've actually finished lately: 34

In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970.

- jacket copy for A Place in the Country* (emphases mine)

--
* This book costs £20, and has fewer than 200 pages.

Yes

The art of writing is the attempt to contain the teeming black scrawl which everywhere threatens to gain the upper hand, in the interests of maintaining a halfway functional personality.

- WG Sebald, A Place in the Country

On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

'Understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur'

Teju Cole, on the German Chatwin (albeit with no reference to the billion typos in the HB edition).

Five essays on Sebald

to be found starting here, on BBC iPlayer.

GODDAMN!

'Exceptional' life of Max Sebold

It is just over a decade since the author WG Sebald, or Max Sebald as he was known to friends, was killed in a car crash at the age of 57.

- BBC Today programme

... and apparently that's too long to remember how to spell his goddamn name.

Found in books - 3

In a discarded library copy [for shame!] of WG Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction:

1) A stamp reading

LANGUAGES, LIT/FICTION DIVISION
HAMILTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
55 YORK BLVD.
HAMILTON, ONTARIO
L8R 3KI

which I think says everything you need to know about Sebald's writing; the confusions book-folks get themselves into by trying to classify things (too cleverly or too simply: what is translated work doing under 'LANGUAGES'?); and the unanswerable but nonetheless interesting question of where exactly the line falls between literature and (all other) fiction, and/or whether it falls there at all.

2) A yellow slip bearing an invitation from BetterWorldBooks to 'help improve delivery times'. With which I would have no problem (in principle, you understand: I still wouldn't actually fill it in), were it not signed off

My friends look forward to hearing from you

- Sincerely, Your Book

Gah!

Sebald summarises the human condition

Acts of negligence in accordance
with relative beauty
strength or wit

- WG Sebald, 'Festifal', Across the Land and the Water

Books finished - quarter ending October 16th

Maps & Legends - Michael Chabon
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - Will Eisner
Leonard Woolf: a life - Victoria Glendinning
Unrecounted - WG Sebald
The Rings of Saturn - WG Sebald
Austerlitz - WG Sebald

Why (do) we do it

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work...

- WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Authors whose works I have read (almost) all of (almost) by accident

Bruce Chatwin
Geoff Dyer
WG Sebald

Real v. Authenti City

What I'm striving for is authenticity. None of it is real.

- WG 'Judas' Sebald