Writing about writing and reading
I bought this based on W.G. Sebald's recommendation, and it did not disappoint. Set in Germany, in the weeks after the war has ended, the story follows one soldier as he wanders the wreckage, looking for food, shelter and love. The writing is continuously subtle and deft, and the imagery almost always seems to be …
Much like the others I've read by this author, this book deals heavily with memory, loss, and--more directly than the others--the holocaust. The narrator recounts his experiences with four characters, in four sections of the book. Each character is an emigrant from Germany, and each, in some way, seems to want to forget some aspect …
This book is about memory. But similar to the other Sebald novel I've read, Rings of Saturn, the true meaning of the book was not clear to me until the end. The novel features an unnamed narrator who may or may not be Sebald himself, traveling about Europe and reminiscing (also similar to Rings of …
Continue reading "Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald: A dark view on memory"
Very few books I've read can hold so much power in so few words. The ending of this book, in the final paragraphs, performs a tying up of the whole novel that changes the light cast on all the previous pages. The Affirmation had a similar effect in its final page, but this one …
Rings of Saturn's seemingly random topic hoping is all coming together, related in the big picture by every thought, every piece of history he talks about seeming to show how humans are terrible, or maybe that the world is terrible. Aside from the overt bleakness of the historical stuff he talks about, there is a …
Jonas David 