Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald
Carole Angier
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald
Carole Angier
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Angier wants to argue that Sebald put his invention in the service of showing people a horror they preferred not to see.
Angier’s book is ungainly at times, and oddly structured. It escapes, for sure, what the biographer Michael Holroyd called 'the prison of chronology.' Readers not already familiar with Sebald’s work will find her synopses of his books difficult to parse. But her biography acquires a stubborn dignity.
Sebald, as Angier so meticulously documents, constantly shifts between soliciting and frustrating our confidence in the historical veracity of his work.
[Angier] has done a meticulous job of research, both in Germany, where Sebald was born, and in England, where he lived for much of his adult life, interviewing hundreds of friends and colleagues, scrutinising every scrap of his voluminous writings, and unearthing the identity of many of the characters whose stories he used.
... impressive.
Sebald...borrowed liberally from other writers without acknowledgement. He pried into the lives of the people he knew, prodding them for their life stories, letters, and photographs which he wove into his books without their permission. And he lied to friends and journalists.
Perhaps the greatest attraction of Angier’s biography, apart from its patience and thoroughness, is its attention to divided loyalties: to Angier’s own admiration of Sebald’s work (‘the most exquisite writer I know’) and to the feelings of the models and sources who regard themselves as betrayed or robbed in Sebald’s pages.
There were many obstacles [in writing this biography] and Angier had no choice but to ignore them, skirt them, plough over them, turn them to her purpose. She is tenacious, unthwartable, courteous, sympathetic, creative in approach.
... [an] enlightening new biography. It's an apt assessment of a singular artist.
An insistently obtrusive biographer, Angier peppers her paragraphs with the first-person pronoun, dramatising encounters with her sources as though the process—her search—was as significant as her discoveries.
Ms. Angier works like the most dogged of detectives to trace the origins of characters and settings and the way Sebald develops, changes and embellishes his material.
She is clearly a passionate admirer of Sebald and writes well about his three – or four if you include Vertigo (1990): I don’t – major prose works.
... a suitably unorthodox life of this singular writer.
Angier’s Speak, Silence is the first major biography of Sebald to appear in any language, and her approach both confirms his swift canonization in the Anglophone world and suggests there is something a little weird about it.
Accomplished biographer Angier has undertaken the formidable task of capturing the notoriously private and enigmatic Sebald. Drawing on a close reading of Sebald’s oeuvre and countless interviews with childhood friends, classmates, and colleagues, Angier dexterously untangles the autobiographical from the fictional.
Angier devotes a handful of chapters to analyzing Sebald’s work, especially its relationship to his own life, and although these chapters tend to interrupt the flow of the larger narrative, they do add complexity to the portrait of Sebald as a writer who 'lied' about his life for the sake of his literature. Sebald fans will find much to consider in this detailed tome..
Working without authorization of the Sebald estate but without its opposition either, biographer Angier [...] delivers a careful portrait of Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald (1944-2001) replete with astute literary analysis. Its title echoing a favorite book of Sebald’s, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Angier’s life centers on her subject’s learning of the Holocaust as a young student and of his father’s willing service in the Wehrmacht.