After all our talk about Sebald today, I come home to find this link to a new National Review Article about W.G. himself. Jennifer, it's clear your chosen topic is in the public eye. I do hope that by the end of the summer you will give us a few suggestions for Sebald things we should read.
This article is a review of a new volume of Sebald's collected poems: Across the Land and Sea. I'm afraid this reviewer finds his prose better than his poetry...some of which is very obscure - "something like reading “The Waste Land” without the notes".
I remember reading, in college, Wolfgang Borchert's play The Man Outside. A story of the impossibility of returning home after war, I found it very moving at the time. There is a beautiful, quiet US film on the topic called "The Best Years of our Lives" which is well worth seeing.
This is pretty awesome! Definitely did not intend to have "my finger on the literary pulse" but I'm glad more people are caring about him nowadays, especially since the market for contemporary postwar German writers is not huge. Yeah there was a documentary that came out recently called "Patient After Sebald" where the filmmakers would physically try to trace the voyage Sebald took in "The Rings of Saturn" - it's a very new agey documentary. If anyone really wants to read something by him, I think "The Emigrants" is the most easily accessible. But "The Rings of Saturn" is basically a modern masterpiece.
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