A Place in the Country

WG Sebald

The Observer

A Place in the Country by WG Sebald – review

Sebald's posthumous essays affirm his ability to make his own obsessions ours too

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/27/wg-sebald-place-country-review

WG Sebald's quietly potent legacy
Out of tune with the hustling digital world, his singular, deeply personal books continue to inspire and intrigue
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/may/13/wg-sebald-legacy

Note: Trên net có mấy bài về Sebald, link ở đây, rảnh - những khi bớt nhớ ai đó - dịch hầu quí vị độc giả TV,  như GCC, mê Sebald, người có tài biến nỗi ám ảnh của ông, thành, của chúng ta

EBRUARY 6, 2014

Le Promeneur Solitaire: W. G. Sebald on Robert Walser

***
A Place in the Country

The Genius of Robert Walser
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/nov/02/the-genius-of-robert-walser/
J.M. Coetzee
November 2, 2000 Issue

Was Walser a great writer? If one is reluctant to call him great, said Canetti, that is only because nothing could be more alien to him than greatness. In a late poem Walser wrote:

I would wish it on no one to be me.
Only I am capable of bearing myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing.

Walser, nhà văn nhớn?
Nếu có người nào đó, gọi ông ta là nhà văn nhớn, 1 cách ngần ngại, thì đó là vì cái từ “nhớn” rất ư là xa lạ với Walser, như Canetti viết.
Như trong 1 bài thơ muộn của mình, Walser viết:

Tớ đếch muốn thằng chó nào như tớ, hoặc nhớ đến tớ, hoặc lèm bèm về tớ, hoặc mong muốn là tớ
Nhất là khi thằng khốn đó ngồi bên ly cà phê!
Một mình tớ, chỉ độc nhất tớ, chịu khốn khổ vì tớ là đủ rồi
Biết thật nhiều, nhòm đủ thứ, và
Đếch nói gì, về bất cứ cái gì

[Dịch hơi bị THNM. Nhưng quái làm sao, lại nhớ tới lời chúc SN/GCC của K!]

Walser được hiểu như là 1 cái link thiếu, giữa Kleist và Kafka. “Tuy nhiên,” Susan Sontag viết, “Vào lúc Walser viết, thì đúng là Kafka [như được hậu thế hiểu], qua lăng kính của Walser. Musil, 1 đấng ái mộ khác giữa những người đương thời của Walser, lần đầu đọc Kafka, phán, ông này thuổng Walser [một trường hợp đặc dị của Walser]."
Walser được ái mộ sớm sủa bởi những đấng cự phách như là Musil, Hesse, Zweig. Benjamin, và Kafka;  đúng ra, Walser, trong đời của mình, được biết nhiều hơn, so với Kafka, hay Benjamin.

W. G. Sebald, in his essay “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” offers the following biographical information concerning the Swiss writer Robert Walser: “Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so…. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written.” Sebald goes on to ask, “How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows … who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events and things of which it spoke.”

Bài viết của Coetzee về Walser, sau đưa vô “Inner Workings, essays 2000-2005”, Gấu đọc rồi, mà chẳng nhớ gì, ấy thế lại còn lầm ông với Kazin, tay này cũng bảnh lắm. Từ từ làm thịt cả hai, hà hà!

Trong cuốn “Moral Agents”, 8 nhà văn Mẽo tạo nên cái gọi là văn hóa Mẽo, Edward Mendelson gọi Lionel Trilling là nhà hiền giả (sage), Alfred Kazin, kẻ bên lề (outsider), W.H, Auden, người hàng xóm (neighbor)…

Bài của Coetzee về Walser, GCC mới đọc lại, không có tính essay nhiều, chỉ kể rông rài về đời Walser, nhưng mở ra bằng cái cảnh Walser trốn ra khỏi nhà thương, nằm chết trên hè đường, thật thê lương:

On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed.
The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation.
The police photographs showed an old man in overcoat and boots lying sprawled in the snow, his eyes open, his jaw slack. These photographs have been widely (and shamelessly) reproduced in the critical literature on Walser that has burgeoned since the 1960s
Walser’s so-called madness, his lonely death, and the posthumously discovered cache of his secret writings were the pillars on which a legend of Walser as a scandalously neglected genius was erected. Even the sudden interest in Walser became part of the scandal. “I ask myself,” wrote the novelist Elias Canetti in 1973, “whether, among those who build their leisurely, secure, dead regular academic life on that of a writer who had lived in misery and despair, there is one who is ashamed of himself.”

Page-Turner

Robert Walser on Everything and Nothing

W. G. Sebald, in his essay “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” offers the following biographical information concerning the Swiss writer Robert Walser: “Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so…. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written.” Sebald goes on to ask, “How is one to understand an author who was so beset by shadows … who created humorous sketches from pure despair, who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself, whose prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events and things of which it spoke.”

It is one of those perverse ironies of history that this most delicate, self-effacing, and marginal of writers (his books were critically well received and admired by Kafka and Walter Benjamin, among others, but they did not sell), who as a young man enrolled in a school for servants and as an old one dropped dead on Christmas Day during one of his long, solitary walks in a snowy field near the mental hospital he had for more than twenty years been confined to, attracts more readers with every passing year. His completely original voice and sensibility—a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt—remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.

As an antidote to the crassness of mainstream culture, Walser is, in fact, the perfect writer for our times, and since the nineteen-eighties he’s experienced a slow resuscitation. Most recently, New Directions and New York Review Books have alternated bringing out volumes of Walser’s work every couple of years, and readings, academic conferences, and celebrations have proliferated.

“Berlin Stories,” the most recent offering from NYRB, contains mostly new translations of early stories—selected and organized by Jochen Greven, Walser’s German editor, and elegantly translated by Susan Bernovsky—all of them set in the German capital, where Walser lived for seven years before returning permanently to Switzerland, in 1913, “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author” (his own assessment). Greven has broken up the stories into four “symphonic” parts—“The City Streets,” “The Theatre,” “Berlin Life,” “Looking Back”—but this feels arbitrary and counterintuitive even, for these meditative “prose pieces” (part story, part essay) are really the random, associative musings of the flâneur meandering through the city or pondering the puzzles of life in a dismal furnished room on the outskirts of town. A great part of their appeal resides in the ephemeral quality that Sebald speaks of.

Walser made a couple of forays to Berlin but didn’t feel ready to make a more sustained leap until 1905, at the age of twenty-seven, after the publication of his first book, “Fritz Kochers Aufsätze,” which Benjamin Kunkel describes in his 2007 essay on Walser for the magazine as “a collection of essays on everything and nothing.”

The description applies to the present volume as well, as it does to a great deal of Walser’s work; again, therein lies the appeal. These stories, more than revealing the texture of Berlin life at the turn of the century, allow us a window into Walser’s states of mind and into the mechanics of his thought process (he wrote quickly and claimed he never corrected a single line of his writing). Whether he is observing an Abyssinian lion in the zoo, or complaining about pompous, self-important people, or thinking about a park, or observing a play, or assessing the character of the city street, it is always the quality of mind that holds us rapt.

Among the most compelling in the collection are a small cluster of stories at the end that are devoted to women (with whom Walser is said never to have been intimate; nor was he with men, apparently): “Frau Bähni,” “Horse and Woman,” “Frau Scheer,” “The Millionairess,” and above all the masterly “Frau Wilke” (translated here by Christopher Middleton), which shows a frank and unironic tenderness. It is about the relationship between a poor young poet and an older woman who lets him a furnished room and shortly afterward falls ill. The woman is completely alone, with nothing to eat, and no one to care for her. The narrator comes to realize that he is her only link to humankind. Very little happens. Then she dies:

One afternoon soon after her death, I entered her empty room, into which the good evening sun was shining, gladdening it with rose-bright, gay and soft colors. There I saw on the bed the things which the poor lady had till recently worn, her dress, her hat, her sunshade, and her umbrella, and, on the floor, her small delicate boots. The strange sight of them made me unspeakably sad, and my peculiar state of mind made it seem to me almost that I had died myself…. For a long time I looked at Frau Wilke’s possessions, which now had lost their mistress and lost all purpose, and at the golden room, glorified by the smile of the evening sun….

Yet, after standing there dumbly for a time, I was gratified and grew calm. Life took me by the shoulder and its wonderful gaze rested on mine. The world was as living as ever and beautiful as at the most beautiful time. I quietly left the room and went out into the street.

Photograph by Ullstein Bild/The Granger Collection.

Points of Departure

‘A Place in the Country,’ by W. G. Sebald

He wrote in German, but was a “German writer” in the same way that Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Stefan Zweig were “Jewish writers”: tragically and by accident.
Ông viết bằng tiếng Đức, nhưng là một “nhà văn Đức”, theo kiểu của những nhà văn Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Stefan Zweig là “nhà văn Do Thái”: bi thảm và do tai nạn.

The book’s finest essay concerns its earliest figure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its opening resembles a Sebald novel, with the author hiking up the Schattenrain in September 1965, and glimpsing Île St. Pierre, which, Sebald notes, Rousseau had visited in September 1765, after having been forced out of Paris with the banning of his books “Émile” and “The Social Contract,” and exiled from Geneva in a campaign masterminded by a resentful Voltaire. Sebald combines an account of his sojourn with Rousseau’s, and of the philosopher’s subsequent travails — getting tossed out of Switzerland, and even his own grave: In 1794, Rousseau, dead for 16 years, is exhumed by revolutionists and entombed in the Panthéon, in a procession “led by a captain of the United States Navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes and followed by two standard-bearers carrying the tricolore and the colors of the Republic of Geneva.”

W. G. Sebald was born in 1944 in Wer­tach im Allgäu in the Bavarian Alps, educated in Germany and Switzerland, taught literature in England for three decades, and between 1990 and 2001 became world famous for “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn” and “Austerlitz” — four novels about Jews, set variously in Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, Antwerp, Prague, Paris, Suffolk, Manchester and Long Island. He wrote in German, but was a “German writer” in the same way that Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Stefan Zweig were “Jewish writers”: tragically and by accident. As for what he called himself, he hated the name Winfried Georg, and responded only to “Max.” Shortly after “Austerlitz” was published in English, Sebald died in a car crash. Mortal: the universal identity.

Sebald’s self-definition was the shadow subject of everything he wrote, but especially of his nonfiction, which, like his fiction, is measured, solemn, sardonic — with just a whisper of bibliography. “On the Natural History of Destruction” addresses the lack of German response to Allied aerial bombing. “Campo Santo” is composed of a travelogue to Corsica, and Sebald’s more scholarly work on peers like Peter Handke (written before Handke came out in defense of Slobodan Milosevic) and Günter Grass (written before Grass came out as having been a member of the Waffen SS). “A Place in the Country,” which contains profiles of five writers and one painter, is the third volume of nonfiction Sebaldiana to appear in English, and the most casually generous, not least because it’s the last. It’s fitting that his English posterity ends at the beginning — with literary history, and with influence.

That history turns on the moment when Germany was reinventing nationalism — rather when “Germany” was still just a loose collocation of unaffiliated kingdoms, with disparate dialects and tendencies toward internecine violence. The standardization of language, of culture, was a patriotic imperative. With the confederation of Germany in 1815, German painters and composers were in demand, along with a national poet, a position allotted to Goethe. It was precisely this Romantic fervor that the Nazis sought to resurrect, and pervert: Schiller’s plays were staged more than 10,000 times under Hitler; Goethe’s favorite oak was a site of Nazi pilgrimage, despite it being within the perimeter of Buchenwald. Sebald’s Germany was West Germany — ravaged, its literature reconstituting itself through faux-revolutionary alliance and the academic avant-garde, both methods of denial. Meanwhile, in the East, it was socialist realism as usual, or prison.

None of this was satisfactory to Sebald: not the art — which seemed both dull and unstable — and certainly not the politics. Instead, he sought his muses in an alternate past, and at language’s furthest fringes: Adalbert Stifter (1805-68) from Oberplan, Bohemia, who extolled the apathy of nature; Gottfried Keller (1819-90) from Zurich, a chronicler of the modernizing provinces; Kafka, from Prague; Robert Walser, from Biel. The only thing these writers had in common, other than that they were writing from outside the centers of literary power, was Sebald — for whom “minor” was an epithet of praise, and “marginal” a verdict on one’s soul.

Long-form describers of hamlets and trees, and short-form introverted mystics — to Sebald they represented the hearthside regionalism the Nazis homogenized, and the urban urgency they obliterated. All four of his novels bear the marks of these influences, in images and even lines lifted verbatim: parts of Stifter’s story “Der Condor” appear in “The Rings of Saturn,” and of Walser’s short story “Kleist in Thun” in “Vertigo,” unacknowledged. But then Sebald also borrowed from the living, especially from the biographies of émigrés: the poet and translator Michael Hamburger has a cameo in “The Rings of Saturn.”

None of this was plagiarism, or even allusion. This was Sebald proposing a self whose only homeland was the page: Existence beyond the bindings was too compromising. This principle corresponds to the photographs Sebald included in his novels, black-and-white portraits he’d purchased from antique markets; in “Austerlitz,” that boy in the cape holding the plumed tricorn is not Jacques Austerlitz — it can’t be: Jacques Austerlitz is fictional — and yet it is more Jacques Austerlitz than the boy it actually depicts, who remains unknown to the reader (and who remained unknown even to Sebald, who, according to James Wood, paid 30 pence for the photo).

“A Place in the Country” extends Sebald’s canon deeper into the past, and into the Alemannic (which the translator Jo Catling defines as the region comprising southwest Germany, northwest Switzerland and Alsace). An essay on the Swiss polymath Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) focuses on the almanac as a literary form, whose regulation by the seasons and lunar phases was intended to instill equivalent moral structure in its readers: “Nowhere do I find the idea of a world in perfect equilibrium more vividly expressed than in what Hebel writes about the cultivation of fruit trees, of the flowering of the wheat, of a bird’s nest, or of the different kinds of rain,” Sebald writes. An essay on the Swabian German poet Eduard Mörike (1804-75) considers the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the supposedly staid Biedermeier period, whose emphasis on domesticity and industry fostered a literature preoccupied with “fear of bankruptcy, ruin, disgrace and déclassement.” Mörike finds himself unable to write, unable to escape his family, and he is plagued by fainting spells and impotence; to Sebald these are “responses to the increasing consolidation of power in Germany,” and “the spiritual effects of a society increasingly determined by a work ethic and the spirit of competition.” The bourgeois theme continues in the essay on Keller, whose work, in Sebald’s interpretation, rebelled against capitalism through its concern for the antique; to care for old clocks and wax curios was a political gesture. The hypnotic essay on Walser shows the bourgeois in decline. Here we have the scion of a formerly secure family trying to become a successful writer, and failing by becoming a genius, though unrecognized and deranged. He languishes for the rest of his life in a Swiss asylum. The essay is framed by snapshots of two elderly men: Walser and Sebald’s own grandfather, or so it seems, both of whom died in 1956. Their doubling must be understood not as supernatural, but as the trauma of a shared “Trauerlaufbahn,” a “career in mourning,” a word Sebald thought he had coined, until he came across it in Walser’s novel “The Robber.”

The book’s finest essay concerns its earliest figure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its opening resembles a Sebald novel, with the author hiking up the Schattenrain in September 1965, and glimpsing Île St. Pierre, which, Sebald notes, Rousseau had visited in September 1765, after having been forced out of Paris with the banning of his books “Émile” and “The Social Contract,” and exiled from Geneva in a campaign masterminded by a resentful Voltaire. Sebald combines an account of his sojourn with Rousseau’s, and of the philosopher’s subsequent travails — getting tossed out of Switzerland, and even his own grave: In 1794, Rousseau, dead for 16 years, is exhumed by revolutionists and entombed in the Panthéon, in a procession “led by a captain of the United States Navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes and followed by two standard-bearers carrying the tricolore and the colors of the Republic of Geneva.”

W. G. “Max” Sebald is still buried near Norfolk. His books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.

A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

By W. G. Sebald

Translated by Jo Catling

208 pp. Random House. $26.

Sunday Book Review

Points of Departure

‘A Place in the Country,’ by W. G. Sebald

By JOSHUA COHENMARCH 21, 2014

W. G. Sebald was born in 1944 in Wer¬tach im Allgäu in the Bavarian Alps, educated in Germany and Switzerland, taught literature in England for three decades, and between 1990 and 2001 became world famous for “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn” and “Austerlitz” — four novels about Jews, set variously in Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, Antwerp, Prague, Paris, Suffolk, Manchester and Long Island. He wrote in German, but was a “German writer” in the same way that Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Stefan Zweig were “Jewish writers”: tragically and by accident. As for what he called himself, he hated the name Winfried Georg, and responded only to “Max.” Shortly after “Austerlitz” was published in English, Sebald died in a car crash. Mortal: the universal identity.
Sebald’s self-definition was the shadow subject of everything he wrote, but especially of his nonfiction, which, like his fiction, is measured, solemn, sardonic — with just a whisper of bibliography. “On the Natural History of Destruction” addresses the lack of German response to Allied aerial bombing. “Campo Santo” is composed of a travelogue to Corsica, and Sebald’s more scholarly work on peers like Peter Handke (written before Handke came out in defense of Slobodan Milosevic) and Günter Grass (written before Grass came out as having been a member of the Waffen SS). “A Place in the Country,” which contains profiles of five writers and one painter, is the third volume of nonfiction Sebaldiana to appear in English, and the most casually generous, not least because it’s the last. It’s fitting that his English posterity ends at the beginning — with literary history, and with influence.
That history turns on the moment when Germany was reinventing nationalism — rather when “Germany” was still just a loose collocation of unaffiliated kingdoms, with disparate dialects and tendencies toward internecine violence. The standardization of language, of culture, was a patriotic imperative. With the confederation of Germany in 1815, German painters and composers were in demand, along with a national poet, a position allotted to Goethe. It was precisely this Romantic fervor that the Nazis sought to resurrect, and pervert: Schiller’s plays were staged more than 10,000 times under Hitler; Goethe’s favorite oak was a site of Nazi pilgrimage, despite it being within the perimeter of Buchenwald. Sebald’s Germany was West Germany — ravaged, its literature reconstituting itself through faux-revolutionary alliance and the academic avant-garde, both methods of denial. Meanwhile, in the East, it was socialist realism as usual, or prison.
None of this was satisfactory to Sebald: not the art — which seemed both dull and unstable — and certainly not the politics. Instead, he sought his muses in an alternate past, and at language’s furthest fringes: Adalbert Stifter (1805-68) from Oberplan, Bohemia, who extolled the apathy of nature; Gottfried Keller (1819-90) from Zurich, a chronicler of the modernizing provinces; Kafka, from Prague; Robert Walser, from Biel. The only thing these writers had in common, other than that they were writing from outside the centers of literary power, was Sebald — for whom “minor” was an epithet of praise, and “marginal” a verdict on one’s soul.
s, and short-form introverted mystics — to Sebald they represented the hearthside regionalism the Nazis homogenized, and the urban urgency they obliterated. All four of his novels bear the marks of these influences, in images and even lines lifted verbatim: parts of Stifter’s story “Der Condor” appear in “The Rings of Saturn,” and of Walser’s short story “Kleist in Thun” in “Vertigo,” unacknowledged. But then Sebald also borrowed from the living, especially from the biographies of émigrés: the poet and translator Michael Hamburger has a cameo in “The Rings of Saturn.”
None of this was plagiarism, or even allusion. This was Sebald proposing a self whose only homeland was the page: Existence beyond the bindings was too compromising. This principle corresponds to the photographs Sebald included in his novels, black-and-white portraits he’d purchased from antique markets; in “Austerlitz,” that boy in the cape holding the plumed tricorn is not Jacques Austerlitz — it can’t be: Jacques Austerlitz is fictional — and yet it is more Jacques Austerlitz than the boy it actually depicts, who remains unknown to the reader (and who remained unknown even to Sebald, who, according to James Wood, paid 30 pence for the photo).
“A Place in the Country” extends Sebald’s canon deeper into the past, and into the Alemannic (which the translator Jo Catling defines as the region comprising southwest Germany, northwest Switzerland and Alsace). An essay on the Swiss polymath Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) focuses on the almanac as a literary form, whose regulation by the seasons and lunar phases was intended to instill equivalent moral structure in its readers: “Nowhere do I find the idea of a world in perfect equilibrium more vividly expressed than in what Hebel writes about the cultivation of fruit trees, of the flowering of the wheat, of a bird’s nest, or of the different kinds of rain,” Sebald writes. An essay on the Swabian German poet Eduard Mörike (1804-75) considers the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the supposedly staid Biedermeier period, whose emphasis on domesticity and industry fostered a literature preoccupied with “fear of bankruptcy, ruin, disgrace and déclassement.” Mörike finds himself unable to write, unable to escape his family, and he is plagued by fainting spells and impotence; to Sebald these are “responses to the increasing consolidation of power in Germany,” and “the spiritual effects of a society increasingly determined by a work ethic and the spirit of competition.” The bourgeois theme continues in the essay on Keller, whose work, in Sebald’s interpretation, rebelled against capitalism through its concern for the antique; to care for old clocks and wax curios was a political gesture. The hypnotic essay on Walser shows the bourgeois in decline. Here we have the scion of a formerly secure family trying to become a successful writer, and failing by becoming a genius, though unrecognized and deranged. He languishes for the rest of his life in a Swiss asylum. The essay is framed by snapshots of two elderly men: Walser and Sebald’s own grandfather, or so it seems, both of whom died in 1956. Their doubling must be understood not as supernatural, but as the trauma of a shared “Trauerlaufbahn,” a “career in mourning,” a word Sebald thought he had coined, until he came across it in Walser’s novel “The Robber.”
The book’s finest essay concerns its earliest figure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its opening resembles a Sebald novel, with the author hiking up the Schattenrain in September 1965, and glimpsing Île St. Pierre, which, Sebald notes, Rousseau had visited in September 1765, after having been forced out of Paris with the banning of his books “Émile” and “The Social Contract,” and exiled from Geneva in a campaign masterminded by a resentful Voltaire. Sebald combines an account of his sojourn with Rousseau’s, and of the philosopher’s subsequent travails — getting tossed out of Switzerland, and even his own grave: In 1794, Rousseau, dead for 16 years, is exhumed by revolutionists and entombed in the Panthéon, in a procession “led by a captain of the United States Navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes and followed by two standard-bearers carrying the tricolore and the colors of the Republic of Geneva.”
W. G. “Max” Sebald is still buried in Norfolk. His books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.

A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY
By W. G. Sebald
Translated by Jo Catling
208 pp. Random House. $26.

Correction: April 13, 2014
Because of an editing error, a review on March 23 about “A Place in the Country,” a collection of non-fiction writings by W. G. Sebald , referred incorrectly to Sebald’s burial place. It is in the English county of Norfolk, not “near” it.
Joshua Cohen’s next novel, “Book of Numbers,” will be published in 2015.