EMERGENCE OF MEMORY, THE: Conversations with W.G. Sebald [Hardcover]

This is NOT a stand-alone introduction. If you have not read at least two of W.G. Sebald's books, either in German or in English translation, STOP! Don't read this review and certainly don't read Lynne Sharon Scwartz's thin compendium of magazine pieces about Sebald before encountering the man himself!

The first Sebald publication in English was The Emigrants, and I'd strongly recommend it as a starting point for new readers. The translation by Michael Hulse is extremely fine, rendering the nuances of Sebald's deliberately hesitant, gently old-fashioned prose in equally modest yet evocative English. Sebald's longest and most novelistic book, Austerlitz, was his last finished work; I like the translation less, but I'm in awe of the accomplishment, both from a literary and an emotional viewpoint. Read Austerlitz second, and then if you're not similarly awed, you'll scarcely need to look at "the emergence of memory".

Memory is both Sebald's subject and his tool. Memory is the whole person, and yet memory is both partial and selective, so that no one can ever be entirely whole. As long as memory persists, no one is entirely absent, either, since memory is a clouded looking glass between the living and the dead. Sebald's narrative style operates as a kind of rummaging in memory - his own and others - as the author/narrator recounts the efforts of others to recapture the meaning of memories and remembered artifacts. One memory often blunders upon another in Sebald's highly parenthetical style. Coincidences and chances reveal unsuspected channels of memory. Memory is the only wall against final mortality.

Sebald was in his mid forties when he wrote his first book, a prose poem titled After Nature in its English translation. He was fifty-seven when he died in a auto accident, just in the first flush of literary accalim. The world of journalists and critics thus had rather little time to get acquainted with the reclusive author. Lynn Sharon Schwartz has strained the thin pottage of interviews and essays about Sebald to give us the odd gobbets of biographical nutriment that comprise her book. The most interesting pieces are the five transcribed interviews, by Eleanor Wachtel, Carole Angier, Michael Silverblatt, Joseph Cuomo, and Arthur Lubow. Several of these were prepared for publications with specifically Jewish readerships.

I've debated, even as I write, whether I should attempt to summarize any of the essays and interviews in this slender volume, or whether doing so might "spoil" the experience of reading Sebald for yourself. I've decided the latter, so my evaluation of "the emergence" can only be abstract and cursory. Sebald is both honest and elusive. Reading his responses to the questions posed by interviwers, I discovered another Sebald persona, less intellectually rarified, less somber, more amiable, more casual. Any number of suppositions I'd formed about his influences and his working methods were, by and large, confirmed. The enormous stress of being German in the post-Shoah world is never absent from his voice or his writing, but beneath his anguish and pessimism about human experience, I hear in his voice and in his writing an adoration of life such as it is, a kind of Homeric Hades where memories wander as the ghosts of heroes. Sebald fans will definitely find chunks of nutritious meat and vegetables in this little stewpot of a critical anthology.

First, the caveat (and I see that I am repeating the previous reviewer in this respect): If you haven't already read two or three of the prose narratives of W.G. Sebald, this book will be virtually meaningless to you. If, however, you have read three or all four of the major works -- "Vertigo", "The Emigrants", "The Rings of Saturn", and "Austerlitz" -- then it is likely you will find that THE EMERGENCE OF MEMORY provides an instructive gloss on that reading experience.

The book collects five transcribed interviews with Sebald and five (including the introduction) articles about him and his work. The interviews are more interesting and enjoyable than the articles, in large part because we get to hear Sebald himself. He comes across as having been very affable, a bit reserved but certainly not aloof, and all in all decent and thoughtful and articulate, even in his second language of English.

Both in the interviews and the articles, the discussion does not smack too much of academic literary commentary. Thank Goodness! I just finished reading the four major prose narratives for the second time, and I thought that afterwards I would browse in several secondary books of commentary in the hope that they would enrich or broaden my reading experience. With three of them, I could not read more than ten or fifteen pages. (The state and quality of academic literary criticism, at least for the general reader, has not improved appreciably in the 35 years since I was in college.) THE EMERGENCE OF MEMORY and one other ("Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald" -- which I hope to review in the next week or so) were the only worthwhile ones.

What I especially valued in the book (in addition to the better feel I got for Sebald the man) were (1) the discussions (relatively brief) of some of the sources or models for the four subjects of "The Emigrants" and for Jacques Austerlitz of "Austerlitz", and (2) the discussions (also relatively brief) of the sorts of adjustments, alterations, or elaborations that Sebald made to and among the strict facts of history (reality) in order to enhance the effectiveness of their presentation in his works ("The invention comes in at the level of minor detail most of the time * * *.").

In my opinion, Sebald is one of the great authors of the latter half of the 20th Century -- the last great writer of the century. His four prose narratives comprise a body of work that will be read, will be discussed, and will influence other writers and visual artists for the next century (assuming that our literary tradition endures). For those who have not read his work, my advice is to just plunge in -- probably beginning with "The Emigrants". Do not -- to repeat myself -- read a book such as this as some sort of introduction or, even worse, substitute.

W.G. Sebald was among the most remarkable of European writers to emerge from Europe over the last 20 years, and this brief compendium of articles gives you an idea of his brilliance and talents, which were taken from us all too soon. I cannot say that all of the articles in here are good-Ruth Franklin's critique of Sebald's approach to the Holocaust is embarrassingly immature. However, one does get the full pantheon of Sebald's influences here, as well as a good idea of his creative process. Worth looking at of course, but for the real thing, simply turn to Sebald's books.