Speak, Silence
In Search of W. G. Sebald
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands
'Spectacular' Observer
'A remarkable portrait' Guardian
W. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile.
The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald's birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
