W.G. Sebald Interviewed

 In prison, I read about W. G. Sebald then the inter-library loan program delivered to me his novel Austerlitz. I cannot say the novel bowled me over, those notes are buried somewhere. I did like the interspersing of photos - this makes a lot of sense (more sense?) in these days of the internet. The Literary Review republished an interview of Sebald, and I was curious to see what he had to say for himself. I have learned since my release that the writer may not have been quite so honest in his interviews, so I read this interview with an eye towards this problem. I do not think any questions apply to the answers he gave in this interview, especially the following quotations:

In your work you take facts from the real world and make them fictional. ‘Austerlitz’ is classified by your publisher as fiction, yet it reads more like a memoir. Do you consciously write fiction? What does that genre mean to you?

I try to write prose fiction but the novel genre is alien to me. By prose fiction I mean a form of text which in all its diverse dimensions seeks to attain a higher degree of intensity and precision than can commonly be found in the contemporary novel.

You like to insert old photographs, drawings and maps into your narrative. Why?

Photographs and other oddments are part of the material I work with and thus, like the endless notes and quotations which go into the making of a text, have a legitimate place in it. There are other, more complicated considerations – aber das ist ein weites Feld.

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Your prose is very precise. Do you find it easy to write?

No. Writing is, for me, an exacting and painstaking business which, however, seems to get steadily harder as one goes along. I stare in incredulity at writers, like Updike for instance, who turn out novels like bakers make buns.

Where do you write?

Anywhere where there is some peace and quiet.

I picked on that last selection to point out to you how hard it is for some writers to get words on paper. Even ones with world-wide reputations have to work at putting words on paper. So, no excuses for you, or for me.

The first set was selected for explaining how and why Sebald added images to his prose. What I have written so far has no place for such a thing, but that does not mean we need to exclude the idea altogether. I like the idea of the novel as a collage - different perspectives and all that. Why not add images to the collage?

One last quote, added with the hope of inspiring any would-be writers stumbling over this site:

What is the relation between creativity and mental instability?

‘Inspiration’ – for want of a better word – always comes from the periphery. Borderlines, in the social, psychological, linguistic and topographical sense, are important ingredients in the creative process.

Some links I found today that might be of interest:  

The Storyteller | Ben Lerner | The New York Review of Books

He told “fictions” rather than “lies” | Vertigo - WordPress.com 

Three new books on W. G. Sebald and some afterthoughts 

 sch 10/24/22