Sebald's Writing Tips

[Mark Kohut]

Rings of Saturn hit me, by the end, like Gothic (or horror) fiction
hits some folks. Slow accumulation of feelings about the past.
All lost, gone. Death-haunted to me.

 When Ford called The Good Soldier the saddest story ever told, he
may have meant this one.

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 8:45 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l