Sebald's Writing Tips

[matthew cissell]

But also this from "On the Natural History of Destruction":
    I do not think my dislike for the ostentatious avant-gardist style
of Schmidt’s study of the moment of destruction derives from a
fundamentally conservative attitude to form and language, for unlike
this five-finger exercise the discontinuous notes made by Jacki in
Hubert Fichte’s novel Detlevs Imitationen "Grunspan" (Detlev’s
Imitations) during his researches on the Hamburg air raid seem to me a
very plausible literary approach, probably mainly because they are not
abstract and imaginary in character, but concrete and documentary. It
is with this documentary approach, which has an early precursor in
Nossack’s Der Untergang, that German postwar literature really comes
into its own and begins the serious study of material incommensurable
with traditional aesthetics.

   I think this shows what it is that James Wood likes so much about
Sebald's writing, this approach that is documentary and conducts a
serious study of that stuff writer's mine, called history. It is
apparently this which he finds lacking in writers like Pynchon.

  Have many of you folks read much of Sebald? I read Austerlitz some
months ago and it's interesting how it overlaps with GR in a way and
yet is 180º out from it. Maybe Kai doesn't see it like that.

ciao
mc



On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> http://richardskinner.weebly.com/blogposts/max-sebalds-writing-tips
>
> Reminds me of the intro to Slow Learner.
>
> " ... My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied
> by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. My second thought was about
> some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to
> one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to
> have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then ..."
>
>
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