Silent Catastrophes: Essays

In this incisive posthumous collection, novelist Sebald (Across the Land and the Water), who died in 2001, meditates on 19th- and 20th-century Austrian fiction and poetry. The first half of the volume explores the “psychological factors which govern writing.” In “A Small Traverse,” for instance, Sebald suggests that Ernst Herbeck’s fragmentary poems reflect the schizophrenia that plagued him throughout his adult life. “To the Edge of Nature” examines how Adalbert Stifter’s admiration for bourgeois society, despite his modest upbringing, undergirds the ambivalent class politics of his novels. The book’s second half delves into how Austrian writers refracted historical developments through their fiction, as when Sebald contends in “A Kaddish for Austria” that the sense of foreboding that pervades Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel, Radetzky March, stems from the increasingly virulent antisemitism Roth experienced as a Jewish man living in Berlin. Sebald takes a more critical view of Hermann Broch’s fascism parable, Bergroman, written in the mid-1930s, asserting that Broch’s endorsement of his protagonist’s “passive resistance,” which took the form of escaping from politics into nature, amounted to “passive collaboration.” The prose can be knotty, but the insightful analysis will reward those who stick with it. Sebald’s fans will want to take a look. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)