A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, Sebald had a career in the academic proponency of German literature. Silent Catastrophes is the first English translation of two essay collections from 1985 and 1991, The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland. (‘Uncanny’ would be a better translation than ‘strange’, but neither title goes easily into English.)
It is fair to warn fans of Sebald’s distinctive manner of lucidly depressed observation that much of this is in the familiar mandarin mock-philosophy style of 1980s literary criticism:
It is perhaps only now that we can grasp the full implications of his theory, in following, for example, Gregory Bateson’s theories on the subject of aesthetics-evolution-epistemology, according to which the successive loss of our ‘natural’ affinity with aesthetic structures is described as an epistemological ‘mistake’ whose consequences cannot yet be guessed at.
We can grasp the full implications, but at the same time the consequences cannot yet be guessed at. I don’t think we need bother.
The Austrian novel is one of the most interesting traditions in Europe. Sebald wasn’t part of it; he grew up in Bavaria, on the other side of the border, an early lesson in the temptations of exile that led him to East Anglia. These essays cover a good number of the most significant figures, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Thomas Bernhard, but by no means all.
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