Lerner, Cusk, Greenwell, Hemon, Cole, Dyer, Self, Sinclair, Craig, Hamburger . . . The list of Anglophone writers who bear a real or critically imposed debt to the German W. G. Sebald feels endless and has been repeated to the point of tedium. This attests less to the critical fervor accrued around Sebald’s influence over the past quarter century (though his 2001 death still feels recent) than to an obvious truth. His method, if there was one, was “modular and scalable; from an infinity of information, one need only choose a few data points and thread their repetitions through a series of different contexts,” as Ryan Ruby wrote in a review of Carole Angier’s feeble 2021 Sebald biography, Speak, Silence. It would seem, put differently, quite straightforward: see a photograph in a book, or a narrator who sees a mosquito and remembers a seventeenth-century Viennese naturalist’s trip to Spain, and call the thing Sebaldian. There was a point of saturation, around the early years of the previous decade, where everyone worth reading became a Sebaldian. Finding a more influential author over the past three decades would prove a challenge. Sebald’s only peers in terms of critical devotion accrued on this side of Y2K, as the Costa Rican and Puerto Rican writer Carlos Fonseca points out in his essay on the German, are David Foster Wallace and Roberto Bolaño. We could perhaps add Clarice Lispector, but as is the case with many great women writers, her global reception came decades late; Karl Ove Knausgaard, the other possible candidate, feels like a bit of a stretch.
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