letters

Borrowed Jews

Booker finalist Brandon Taylor alerted us by tweet to this item on one of Europe's most respected writers:

"Jordan didn’t foresee that Sebald would pass Gebhardt’s memoir off as his own writing without attribution. That upset him. Sebald 'should not have used it so closely without crediting it,' he tells Angier. Weighing the evidence, Angier decides that most of Sebald’s purloined histories amount to run-of-the-mill authorial borrowing, but in extreme cases like Bechhofer’s, she wonders: 'Can there be any defense of Sebald here, with his special empathy for Jewish victims, and his special awareness of the moral dangers of a German writing about them?' Her answer is no. She thinks he should have attached a short note at the beginning or end. 'It wouldn’t destroy the effect of his story to let us know that it is a fiction, and that real people stand behind it,' she writes. 'He is no longer here to make the decision. But his publishers could.'"

Austerlitz

"And so, said Austerlitz, no sooner had I arrived in Prague than I found myself back among the scenes of my early childhood, every trace which had been expunged from my memory for as long as I could recollect. As I walked through the labyrinth of alleyways, thoroughfares, and courtyards between Vlasska and Nerudova, and still more so when I felt the uneven paving of the Sporkova underfoot as step by step I climbed uphill, it was as if I had already been this way before and memories were revealing themselves to me not be any mental effort but through my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life. It was true that I could recognize nothing for certain, yet I had to keep stopping now and then because my glance was caught by a finely wrought window grading, the iron handle of a bell pull, or the branches of an almond tree growing over a garden wall."

~~ from Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

The Rings of One-Star Reviewers

On a long plane ride from Shanghai to Chicago, I was mesmerized by an excerpt from The Rings of Saturn. It was an amazingly interesting read which included sustained narrative on Chinese empire and British aggression in the 19th century as well as a vivid portrait of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.

This evening, I surfed online to learn more about W. G. Sebald's book, and I see that the most recent Amazon review was posted almost exactly as I was enjoying the excerpt; alas, it's the classic one-star special: "A pretensious pile of rubbish. Paragraphs that stretches over pages... silly photos that will slow down the download... I prefer some dialogue in novels. If I really want to hear a long train of consciousness I would listen to my own."

No doubt, James Patterson is writing a sequel to Dante's Inferno, where one-star reviewers share an added circle in hell.

In other news, I'm happy to report that "Frade Killed Ellen" is now available thanks to Dutch Kills Press. I'm very grateful if you're able to support the writer and publisher by purchasing this 35-page e-single. Thank you. Follow this link for a teaser.