Review: The Emergence of Memory - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

This book consists of conversations with, and essays upon, the German writer W G Sebald, author of Austerlitz, Vertigo, The Emgrants, and Rings of Saturn. When W G Sebald died in a car accident in 2001, after publishing just four books, his readers felt both a huge sense of loss, and also a sense of irony, that such a melancholic, perceptive writer should have come to an end quite so synchronistic with his writings. It seemed so appropriate that his disjointed, somehow incomplete literary wanderings should come to an abrupt end, leaving so many questions hanging in the wind.

All great works of literature either found a genre or dissolve one (Walter Benjamin, quoted in the book under review), and Sebald’s books are quite unique, baring a resemblance to nothing which has gone before, and almost certainly being followed by no book quite like them. Sebald creates thoughts in us which are entirely our own, as though discovering something which has always been there, but unrecognised until the convoluted prose of Sebald has penetrated into out own depths to release something precious from its swirling eddies.