L’Oeil oder die weisse Zeit (The Eye or the White Time), by Jan Peter Tripp. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Schmalfuss, Berlin
Discussed in this essay:
Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald, by Carole Angier. Bloomsbury. 640 pages. $32.
In mid-August of this year I traveled from Berlin to the small town of Sonthofen, in the Allgäu region of southern Germany, to research an article about the author W. G. Sebald, who grew up there and is the subject of a recent biography. Sebald’s fiction almost always begins with the narrator going on a journey, partly for the purposes of research and partly for reasons he cannot identify, and I believed that the huge sense of aimlessness which had…
