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PARTISAN REVIEW
unnerved by the ominous warning message in the London Underground,
that could well be inscribed under Sebald's literary crest: "Mind the gap."
The visual element is a hallmark of his novels, but the sound of
Sebald is just as distinctive, finely rendered by the translator, Michael
Hulse. To read Sebald is to feel you are inside a place with unusual
acoustic effects: now like a seashell, now an antiechoic chamber. In this
resonant silence, Sebald himself is like a radio, a crystal set, picking up
voices from the past that soon fade into the static. Yet it would be
wrong to imply that Sebald is only a medium. Whoever W. G. Sebald
may be, he is above all a master of storytelling, an art that requires a
degree of charlatanism, the talent of keeping a straight face, and finally,
a growing belief in one's own tales until one might even swear by their
truth.
If
Sebald tells us he is obsessed with coincidences, convergences,
and echoes, and with "drawing connections between events that lay far
apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order," it is because he
is constantly honing his alibi.
If
he experiences vertigo, it may be
because he no longer knows where he, W. G. Sebald, ends and his
doppelganger, W. G. Sebald, begins.
So who is W. G. Sebald, this peculiar writer who resurrects figures
from the past only to follow them like an undertaker to their deaths; this
connoisseur of eccentrics and madmen, of the detritus of history; this
poet and swindler who, according to all accounts, doubles as a profes–
sor of languages somewhere in the east of England? Whoever he may be,
all we can say for sure is that he is restless, and we can only wait until
he briefly appears to us again, like one of those phantom creatures
rarely sighted, mythical, and easily frightened away.
Nicole Krauss
The Wager of Vaclav Havel
VACLAV HAVEL: A POLITICAL TRAGEDY IN SIX ACTS. By John Keane.
Basic Books,
$27.50.
BACK IN
THE 19705
AND
19805,
three East European intellectuals played
essential roles in the launching of international debate on Central
Europe's destiny and identity, anti-politics, and especially the contribu–
tion of civil society initiatives to dismantling terminally sick Leninist
regimes. They were Adam Michnik, George Konrad, and Vaclav Havel
