A fascinating exercise in ‘writing about nothing’.
Reviews: Sebaldian
Book Review: ‘Threads’ by Julia Blackburn
The Delicate Life of John Craske.
Common Ground
by Rob Cowen A strange book about a local edge-land. This book, which has received rave reviews, wasn't what I expected. I was expecting a fairly typical ‘nature writing’ account of the author's local patch of edge-land near Harrogate in Yorkshire. Perhaps I should have read the dust-jacket more carefully: Blurring the boundaries of memoir,… Continue reading Common Ground
Urne-burial
by Sir Thomas Browne Reflections on the iniquity of oblivion. I first encountered the seventeenth-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne in an essay by one of my favourite writers, Stephen Jay Gould. Many years later, I encountered him again in W.G. Sebald's mastepiece, The Rings of Saturn. Sebald refers to Browne's essay on an ancient urn-burial… Continue reading Urne-burial
Book review: ‘After Nature’ by W.G. Sebald
Three long-form poems, best read as prose.
Book review: ‘A Place in the Country’ by W.G. Sebald
Essays on five writers and a painter who influenced Sebald’s work.
Book review: ‘Across the Land and the Water’ by W.G. Sebald
Selected poems, 1964–2001.
On the Natural History of Destruction
by W.G. Sebald. An extended essay on the ‘scandalous deficiency’ of texts about the Allied bombing of Germany. This is an astonishing book. I put off reading it for ages, due to the specialist nature of its thesis: the paucity of German texts about the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War. But… Continue reading On the Natural History of Destruction
Book review: ‘The Rings of Saturn’ by W.G. Sebald
Unclassifiable masterpiece.
Book review: ‘The Emigrants’ by W.G. Sebald
File under Sebaldian.