This last word from the novelist provides a nice footnote on his own writing.
The late German novelist’s essays of appreciation for writers and artists whose influences pervade his work.
The last book published by Sebald receives its first English translation, after it was issued in Europe in 1998. American readers will likely find it illuminating for its insight into the author’s work and its obsessions, themes, and observations on home and exile. When he writes, in his essay on Rousseau, how “one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable,” it’s plain that this writer is also writing about himself. The longest, most ambitious and revelatory essay is subtitled “A Remembrance of Robert Walser,” who was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, died institutionalized, and was little-known or -read when he was alive: “The traces that Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint to have almost been effaced altogether.” Yet Sebald’s critical resurrection will likely spark the reader’s interest in an author “who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself” and who felt that “he was always writing the same novel, from one prose work to the next—a novel which, he says, one could describe as ‘a much chopped-up or disremembered Book of Myself.’ ” (Walter Benjamin remarked that the characters in Walser’s fiction came “from insanity and nowhere else.”) Contemplating the work of others, Sebald writes from a writer’s rather than a reader’s perspective, of one who shares the affliction, who recognizes that, as he writes of painter Jan Peter Tripp, “beneath the surface of illusion there lurks a terrifying abyss. It is, so to speak, the metaphysical underside of reality, its dark inner lining.”
This last word from the novelist provides a nice footnote on his own writing.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6771-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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