Forthcoming Sebald Books

Vertigo has some information about upcoming books from W.G. Sebald. The first is the collection of essays, A Place in the Country, which briefly popped up on a number of radars last August when New Directions published Sebald’s essay on Walser as an introduction to the latter’s novel The Tanners. The copyright page of The Tanners, notes that said essay is from said collection.

The other two books are new to me:

An eagle-eyed reader of Vertigo has noticed that the website of Professor Jo Catling at the University of East Anglia lists her as the translator of three of the last untranslated texts by her former colleague W.G. Sebald. It appears she is translating Logis in einem Landhaus (which will appear in English as A Place in the Country, to be published by Hamish Hamilton/ Random House in 2010) and Beschreibung des Unglücks and Unheimliche Heimat (which apparently will appear combined as Silent Catastrophes, to be published by the same publisher in 2012).

Unrelatedly (or well, somewhat relatedly), Vertigo also offers a nice post on All Souls by Javier Marias. Here’s a good description of Marias’ style:

Whether or not there is a photograph involved, Marias’ narrators often try to read the faces of the people they observe or meet. Marias seems enamored with the now antiquated notion that deep insights or reliable personality traits can be discerned by studying the face, a reminder that Marias, for all his post-modern attributes, is essentially a novelist of the late 19th and early 20th century. There are direct bloodlines from writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann to Javier Marias. Here’s a moment that could have come right out of Death of Venice. In the Ashmolean Museum, the narrator runs across Clare, his lover, who is also visiting the museum and who is accompanied by her son and her father, thus permitting the narrator to study three generations of family faces at once. He follows the trio and observes the faces of Clare and the elderly gentleman before turning his attention to the young grandson. Almost immediately, the three faces are transposed on top of each other as if they were transparent.

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