Silent Catastrophes by WG Sebald review: 'all frighteningly familiar'

Many of WG Sebald’s observations about Austrian literature could equally be applied to Scotland, writes Stuart Kelly

WG Sebald | Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential writers of this generation. This work brings together two previously untranslated collections of essays, The Description of Misfortune from 1985 and Strange Homeland of 1991. Although they are ostensibly studies in Austrian literature, they are strikingly prescient in a number of ways, and have a particular resonance, I think, to Scottish writing.

Sebald was a German exile, writing here about a neighbouring, smaller country with a shared language, a place that had gone from imperial power to almost provincial anomaly. In the introduction, looking back to the formation of the “trans-garde” “Graz Group”, Sebald aligned himself with those who “in a topographical, social and psychological sense hailed from the periphery”.

Sebald frets, lauds and dissects a literary culture which oscillates between inferiority, bumptious self-aggrandisement, nostalgia, proud parochialism, repression and outbursts of loathing. It is all very frighteningly familiar. If I had a tenner for every time I have heard a Scottish writer or critic talking about how Scottish literature “punches above its weight” I would have ample funds to pay damages incurred when I punch the next pronouncer of that platitude in the gub.

Sebald not only offers a diagnosis, but sketches strategies for success. It is, I feel, important to remember that when Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (significant theorists in Sebald’s oeuvre) were discussing “minor literature”, their epitome of it was Franz Kafka. “Minor” does not mean small or second-rate.

Some of the writers in this book might be familiar – Kafka for one, but also Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth and Thomas Bernhard – and most are published in some form (Arthur Schnitzler and Adalbert Stifter are in Penguin Classics, Jean Améry and Peter Handke are in both Penguin Modern Classics and NYRB Classics). Many – of course, the strangest and most interesting – are not. That need not matter. Sebald was insistent that his work was “Literaturkritik” not the more academic “Literaturwissenschaft”. The best way to grasp the difference is the plaudit that Sebald “put the literary back into literary criticism”. Belles-lettres seems too old-fashioned and dainty. But just as I can thoroughly admire David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer or Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk” while having the scantest interest in either tennis or falconry, it is possible to read Sebald on Austrian writing both profitably and enjoyably.

Sebald was not a cheerleader. It is testament to his integrity that the same authors can be treated with scepticism and admiration. His analysis of the quasi-pornographic Winterreise by Gerhard Roth is insightful but ultimately unconvinced; nevertheless, A Common or Garden Death by the same author sends him into raptures, and includes a brief distillation of Sebald’s guiding concern: “a dignity which has to do with resolutely holding out in hopeless positions and not letting go of superstitions, since in these there is not less knowledge than there is credibility in science”.

Infuriatingly, Landläufiger Tod seems unavailable in English. Similarly, Sebald enthuses over Handke’s The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and its stylistic ingenuity (again, a novel about something that could not interest me less); but when it comes to the later Repetition there is a note of wistful impatience that Handke now “offered little resistance to what the what the critics were willing or able to understand as literature”. As put-downs go, few could be as elegant.

It is unsurprising that the two intertwined themes of the books – Unglück and Heimat – are difficult to translate. Unglück conveys unhappiness, mishap, catastrophe and bad fortune; Heimat is homeland, but with overtones of close-knittedness, safety, even idyll: it is the place where you are not a stranger. The title in German of this part is “Unheimlich Heimat”; but “Strange Homeland” does not capture that “unheimlich” is frequently translated as eerie or uncanny (especially in Freud, who is this book’s necessary spectre).

Part of Sebald’s process is to give proper attention to texts which the word kailyard might best describe, and he finds in them a more pathological undercurrent. The praise of pristine mountains and verdant meadows is not just sentimental yearning and couthy patriotism; it is a desperate clinging to a world that has already disappeared. That Sebald was linking this to environmental disaster shows how prophetic he was. Nobody captures the epitaph quality of pastoral as well as he did.

Given his wry humour, I think Sebald would appreciate that many of these dewy-eyed panegyrics are the literary equivalent of Basil Fawlty hissing “don’t mention the war”. Similarly, Sebald writes about “language machines” way before Chatbots, and drawing in Stanisław Lem (from a piece imagining the “late 1980s” when Sebald is writing in the mid 1980s), the necessity of machines “dreaming”, “mumbling” and “shuffling” to recuperate their efficiency. Experimentalism is crucial even for imaginary computers.

This, ironically, is a profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature. Sebald describes in one novel the narrator’s relief at being in Yugoslavia rather than Austria: “the things that were missing… the loden suits, the lederhosen: in short, no one… wore a costume... Such folkloric costume-wearing ultimately implies the negation of the outside world”… they are “malevolent, unquiet and dead souls”. Remember that come Burns Night.

Silent Catastrophes, by WG Sebald, Jo Catling (trans), Hamish Hamilton, £25