Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature

(Hardback)

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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 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.

Reviews

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature * New Yorker *
Sebald is surely a major European author . . . he reaches the heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust * Independent *
W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time -- Peter Carey
Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald * New York Times *
Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century * The Times *

Author Bio

W. G. Sebald (Author) W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allg u, 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. Jo Catling (Translator) Jo Catling taught German and European literature at the University of East Anglia where she worked closely with W G Sebald from 1993 until his death. Translator of Sebalds A Place in the Country, she is editor (with Richard Hibbitt) of Saturn's Moons- W G Sebald - A Handbook (Legenda, 2011) and has published widely on Sebald and on Rainer Maria Rilke.