Sebald's Writing Tips

[David Morris]

I've read Rings of Saturn.  It's a pleasant read. A mix of memoir and
beautiful divergences and speculations.  But I wouldn't call it a novel.

David Morris

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 4:39 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> ..."
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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