Review by Booklist Review
The life of internationally acclaimed writer W. G. Sebald was cut tragically short in 2001 when he suffered a heart attack at age 57 while driving and collided with a truck. His works combine fiction, history, biography, and photography into a unique fusion that obliquely addresses the collective guilt and subsequent silence of his home country of Germany following WWII. Accomplished biographer Angier has undertaken the formidable task of capturing the notoriously private and enigmatic Sebald. Drawing on a close reading of Sebald's oeuvre and countless interviews with childhood friends, classmates, and colleagues, Angier dexterously untangles the autobiographical from the fictional. The young Max, as Sebald was known to friends, was haunted by the war's legacy and his father's service in the German army, finding in art a way to acknowledge in some measure memory and conscience, though suffering a psychological breakdown in the process. Angier deftly allows this meditative and elegiac genius to emerge naturally from his self-created spectral persona in the first major biography of an artist once considered a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Angier (The Double Bond: The Life of Primo Levi) pieces together the first biography of elusive writer W.G. Sebald (1944--2001) in this well-researched account. The Sebald that Angier conjures is a trickster, singular in his compulsion to invent and play with fact and fiction. Anchored by the accounts of people who knew Sebald, Angier narrates his upbringing in post-WWII Germany with a Nazi father, his emigration to England to teach at the University of Manchester, the publication of The Emigrants in 1992, "the most important event of his writing life," and his tragic death in a car crash at the age of 57. Angier places great emphasis on the silences that shaped his life: the "silent catastrophes" of WWII, the loss of the "good silence of his childhood," as well as the sources who didn't agree to speak to Angier, including his wife. Angier devotes a handful of chapters to analyzing Sebald's work, especially its relationship to his own life, and although these chapters tend to interrupt the flow of the larger narrative, they do add complexity to the portrait of Sebald as a writer who "lied" about his life for the sake of his literature. Sebald fans will find much to consider in this detailed tome. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Associates. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Searching biography of the German writer, who wrestled with the horrors of the Holocaust. Working without authorization of the Sebald estate but without its opposition either, biographer Angier (Jean Rhys, Primo Levi) delivers a careful portrait of Winfried Georg "Max" Sebald (1944-2001) replete with astute literary analysis. Its title echoing a favorite book of Sebald's, Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Angier's life centers on her subject's learning of the Holocaust as a young student and of his father's willing service in the Wehrmacht. The moment was critical. "He had always been notably intelligent," writes the author, "but now he began to pull away from his classmates. He became a wide, unorthodox reader, and more and more critical of accepted opinions." When he was 21, he moved to England, where he taught at the University of East Anglia, where he wrote such significant works as The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and On the Natural History of Destruction. Even though he was an expatriate, Angier remarks, Sebald insisted on teaching courses in German so that he would not lose connection with the language of a people from whom he was deeply alienated. As Angier notes, Sebald's work resists easy classification: One publisher listed his titles as fiction, travel, and history all at once. Fire is a central image in his work, to which Angier gives sensitive attention, finding linkages between his life and writing and those of Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet of two centuries earlier. The author considers Austerlitz to be Sebald's "masterpiece…the peak of his imaginative identification with the victims of the Holocaust, and of his psychological investigation of trauma." She also places his death--not of the automobile accident he caused, but of an aneurysm that killed him behind the wheel--in the context of his certainty that he was destined to die early, having assumed so much of the weight of guilt and sorrow. Every serious reader of Sebald's will find much of value here. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
