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The beauty and tedium of the works of Adalbert Stifter

The 19th-century Austrian was an astonishingly pure stylist, as W.G. Sebald acknowledges – but it takes real dedication to craft to write such boring novels

18 January 2025

9:00 AM

18 January 2025

9:00 AM

Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling

Hamish Hamilton, pp.240, 25

A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, Sebald had a career in the academic proponency of German literature.

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