On the Natural History of Destruction - Hardcover

Sebald, Winfried Georg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375504842 ISBN 13: 9780375504846

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2003

Synopsis

In a profound, thought-provoking meditation, the award-winning author of After Nature reflects on the the topics of individual and collective guilt, the consequences of denying the past, and the need to reclaim history as he examines why Germans have maintained silence on World War II, the Allied bombing that destroyed German cities, and the resulting devastation. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald. The New York Times [Sebald] is writing about what he regards as a disquieting refusal to face facts--not only about what was done to the nation, but by implication, by the nation. . . . No better future for humankind is possible if we do less than look upon the crimes of our past, and their catastrophic results, with 'a steadfast gaze.'The Boston Sunday Globe. This may well be the last of Sebald's writing we'll ever have, so how amazing--and fitting--it is that it seems, in a fashion as uncanny as his prose and perceptions could often be, to close the circle of the ruminations that preoccupied his writing life. The Washington Post. Sebald approaches his subject with sensitivity, yet avoids neither descriptions of horrible carnage nor criticism of writers too preoccupied with absolving themselves of blame to faithfully portray a destroyed Germany. The result is a balanced explication of devastation and denial, and a beautiful coda for Sebald. The secret of Sebald's appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak. --The New York Review of Books

Published in English after the author's untimely death in 2001... Sebald's essay on the 1943 bombing of Hamburg asks how to capture true horror when all human expression tends towards the norm. --Lesley Chamberlain, New Statesman Books of the Year 2009

About the Author:

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previously translated books—The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz—have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375504842
• ISBN 13: 9780375504846
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 202