W.G. Sebald’s borrowed truths and barefaced lies

W.G. Sebald is the modern master of the uncanny — or perhaps that should be ‘was’, as he died in a car crash near Norwich in 2001 at the age of 57. Deciding which tense to use depends on whether you mean ‘W.G. Sebald’ as a shorthand for his body of work, which outlives him, or to refer to the man who wrote it, known to his acquaintances as Max. The question poses its own Sebaldian conundrum, reflecting his strange crepuscular writings with their meditations on the dead and the living, past and present, culture and identity. His ghost lives on in the flickering half-light, the most enigmatic, perhaps, of his characters.

Born in the Bavarian Alps in 1944, Sebald belonged to the generation of Germans whose inordinate moral task was to absorb the Nazi guilt of their parents, a guilt so submerged by shame that it was never mentioned as he was growing up, though it subsequently became the leitmotif of his work. His given name, Winfried, has such a ring of the Third Reich that it is not surprising he abandoned it, as he did his native country. He spent most of his career at the University of East Anglia as a professor of German, but his literary renown is based on the English translations of the extraordinary non-academic writings he began publishing in his forties, especially The Emigrants (1992), which established his international reputation, The Rings of Saturn (1995) and his masterpiece Austerlitz (2001).

In these uncategorisable, liminal books, he slipped the net of genre, blurring the boundaries between fiction, history, essayism and travel writing, to explore issues of memory and buried trauma, most notably that of the Holocaust, through the Jewish refugee characters who people his work. The voice is startlingly original: exquisitely focused yet relentlessly oblique. There’s nothing obviously experimental in his style, which is closer to that of the 19th century than to modernism or postmodernism.