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Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald

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Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald

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Overview

The long-awaited first biography of W. G. Sebald

'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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526634795
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	504,054
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Carole Angier is the author of Jean Rhys: Life & Work, which won the Writer's Guild Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography, following the publication of which she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She taught academic and creative writing for many years and has edited several books of refugee writing. She lives in Oxfordshire.

Preface vii

Note to Readers xi

Part I Beginnings 1

1 W. G. Sebald 3

2 Dr Henry Selwyn 15

Part II Winfried 27

3 Wertach, 1944-52 29

4 Il Ritorno in patria 57

5 Ambros Adelwarth 71

Part III SEBE 87

6 1952-6 89

7 1956-61 111

8 1961-3 137

9 Paul Bereyter 159

Part IV Cocky 175

10 Freiburg, 1963-5 177

11 Fribourg, 1965-6 203

12 The Novel 219

Part V Max, 1966-70 225

13 Manchester, 1966-8 227

14 St Gallen and Manchester, 1968-70 255

15 Max Ferber 277

Part VI Max, 1970-2001 293

16 1970-6 295

17 1977-88 315

18 1989-96 335

19 1997-2001 361

20 Marie 383

Part VII W. G. Sebald 395

21 To The Emigrants 397

22 The Rings of Saturn 403

23 Austerlitz 411

24 An Attempt at Restitution 427

Part VIII Endings 441

25 Unrecounted 443

Acknowledgements 451

Guide to the Companion Page 455

Abbreviations 459

Notes 463

Select Bibliography 581

Picture Credits 601

Index 607

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

08/23/2021
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.)

Publishers Weekly

[Angier has] written an intelligent and intuitive book about a writer who, like certain mountains, has his own weather, and whose career remains a contested site.” - The New York Times

“Angier works like the most dogged of detectives to trace the origins of characters and settings and the way Sebald develops, changes and embellishes his material . . . her arguments, closely marshaled and based on deep thought, are on the whole persuasive.” - The Wall Street Journal

“Nazism was the cataclysmic event whose repercussions defined his [Sebald’s] youth, even if hardly anyone spoke of it . . . His emerging politics—'anti-bourgeois, anti-military, anti-clerical, anti-establishment,’ in Angier’s summation—were part of a broader flourishing . . . Literature became a passion, a rare ember of truth amid the dark cone of silence that surrounded him.” - The New Republic

“Thanks to [Angier’s] exten¬sive research and deep under¬stand¬ing of Sebald’s work, this book will undoubt¬ed¬ly become a valu¬able resource for future Sebald schol¬ars as well. Speak, Silence is a true lit-er¬ary event and a major achievement.” - Jewish Book Council

“Angier . . . recounts Sebald’s insulated childhood in the Bavarian Alps, his growing awareness of German atrocities, his academic career in England, and his sudden success in middle age. In delicate readings of his work, she identifies sources—landlords, family members, schoolteachers, fellow writers and artists—and demonstrates how his writing stemmed from an ineluctable empathy with misfortune and from a persistent, unceasing exploration of historical memory and its limits.” - The New Yorker

"Angier shows the general reader how prone to obfuscation Sebald was: She catches white lies buried in footnotes or tossed out in conversation, as well as deceptions about sources and methods meant to throw critics off his trail." - The Washington Examiner

"Enlightening … an apt assessment of a singular artist." - The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Angier . . . delivers a careful portrait of Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald (1944-2001) replete with astute literary analysis . . . Every serious reader of Sebald’s will find much of value here.” - Kirkus Reviews

“Angier places great emphasis on the silences that shaped his [Sebald’s] 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 . . . Sebald fans will find much to consider in this detailed tome.” - Publishers Weekly

“An extraordinary achievement. Carole Angier has been able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile definitions, allowing his portrait the many hues and changing angles that those who knew him will recognize as profoundly true.” - Alberto Manguel

“It is a considerable achievement to unpick, so convincingly, mysteries Sebald has taken care to contrive. And to do it with such respect, and indeed generosity, that the great originals are burnished” - Iain Sinclair

“Carole Angier extends the scope of biography by turning her intense admiration for Sebald’s work into a personal quest for this enigmatic and disturbing writer” - Hilary Spurling

“A biographer of great sympathy” - Michael Holroyd

“W.G. Sebald so deliberately and cunningly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in his books that every reader longs for a clear-eyed guide to what is invented and what is ‘real’, while at the same time dreading the damage this might do to the delicate webs he weaves. Carole Angier’s tireless detective work has cleared up many of the mysteries, both in his life and in his work, while her critical acumen and manifest admiration for the latter ensures that it emerges enhanced rather than diminished from her labours. A riveting book” - Gabriel Josipovici

“[An] enticing and thorough book ... [that] proves that [Seblald] was, in spite of his tragic and early death, an absolute master of the highest domains of literature.” - Javier Marías

"[Angier] is tenacious, unthwartable, courteous, sympathetic, creative in approach ... She places Sebald’s work squarely in the literature of the Jewish Holocaust but when she more subtlety and heroically examines the writing and pursues the quiet, considerably cloaked life, her approach becomes more nuanced, more befittingly complex." -Lit Hub's Book Post

From the Publisher

2021-07-14
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 Austerlitzto 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald

Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald

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