Born in Germany in 1944, W G Sebald settled in England to become
Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia.
He was acclaimed for four seminal works of fiction, and Austerlitz,
his final and best-known book, received widespread praise before
his untimely death in December 2001. Now his first literary work is
published in English for the first time. Taking the form of a long
prose poem written in blank verse, it explores the fundamental
conflict between man and nature in a highly personalized and potent
fashion. Sebald divides his poem into three distinct parts. First
he writes from the perspective of the 15th-century artist known as
Grunewald, a painter possessed of an extraordinarily tortured
perception of the human condition whose real identity is still in
doubt. Just as Sebald sees this mysterious artist's distorted
images as providing a conduit into creation, so he manipulates the
life of Georg Wilhelm Steller, the theologian turned natural
scientist who forms the focus of the second section of the book.
Finally, in the third part, Sebald examines his own history. 'How
far,' he asks, 'must one go back to find the beginning?' In the
words of the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, Sebald was in his last
five years beginning to reap the harvest of a lifetime's immaculate
thinking, and After Nature is now imbued with a poignant irony
Sebald could not have forseen. At the height of his powers
Grunewald faded abruptly into a twilight he still inhabits; Georg
Steller did not live to see the publication of his zoological
masterpiece. It can only be hoped Sebald's straining for a
primordial truth will survive him. (Kirkus UK)
Three men walk the pages of W. G. Sebald’s first literary work – the painter Mathias Grünewald, the botanist G. W. Steller and W. G. Sebald himself. Written as a long poem in three parts, After Nature delves into each of these lives in turn, teasing out the haunting uncertainties of the past and revealing the terrible burden that history places on all of our shoulders.
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