The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald

In her introduction to The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (Seven Stories Press), editor Lynne Sharon Schwartz notes that many of Sebald’s readers were left “uncannily bereft” at the author’s death in a car accident in 2001. The knowledge that there can be no new work from Sebald will prompt many of those readers to turn to this slim volume—a collection of five interviews with Sebald and four essays on his work. The best piece is the interview conducted by Eleanor Wachtel for the CBC Radio show Writers & Company that aired in October 1997, when only one of Sebald’s books—The Emigrants—was available in English translation. In that interview Sebald tells Wachtel that “the older you get, . . . the more you forget [as] vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion,” and “that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density, a very high degree of specific weight.” These interviews and essays prompted me to pull my own Sebald favourites—The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants—from the shelf for a rereading, thus demonstrating the enduring appeal of Sebald’s recurring themes, which include, Schwartz writes, “the destruction of the natural world and the graceless incursions of technology; the overriding significance of memory.”