But all of them are marked by the narrator’s stubborn quest to piece together his story. He was a biographer in the literal sense: a life writer.Įach of those remarkable books, which Sebald published in the decade or so before his death, in 2001, takes a different form, moving from the concentration of poetry to the fluid expansiveness of a novel. From the four exiles in “ The Emigrants” to the reflections on posterity in “ The Rings of Saturn,” from the formative travels of Stendhal and Kafka in “ Vertigo” to the study of a Kindertransport child in “ Austerlitz ,” Sebald followed that tenuous silken weave, stretching through the chaos of history, that constitutes a life. He called an early project a “prose work with pictures,” and his last, charmingly, “a prose book of an indeterminate kind.” Perhaps the poet Michael Hamburger put it best, when he praised his friend’s “essayistic semi-fiction, which gives rope to both observation and imagination.” If you stand back far enough, though, you could also call Sebald’s work biography. When asked to categorize his books by genre, W. G.
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