09: NOISE

 Sergio Chejfec, writer [Argentina]

[Traducción (subtítulos): Marilena de Chiara]

Transcription:

“If it is about Sebald I would choose the word noise. His relationship with noise in general has always drawn my attention. His relationship with everything related with sound, ambience moreover. It is true that I never monitored the topic in his literature, but I was impressed by a comment of his, in an article that right now I do not exactly recall. He describes the town where he grew up as a post-war corner, not yet civilized by machines. Therefore we can say that he grew up surrounded by the sounds of manual tools and, obviously, by the sound produced by local nature. I have the impression that it is possible to identity in his literature the impact provoked by the encounter with the cities noise. Some sort of shock which is not only cultural or sensory but, I am inclined to believe, mostly conceptual. And I use this word because it is the only explanation I find for describing the presence transmitted by its narrators. As they were completely stunned creatures, yet at the same time aware of the distance that separates them from what surrounds them at that time. Sebald develops a king of always solipsistic and moreover condensed speculation which I am inclined to assigned to this kind of individual, someone disarranged in auditory terms. And this leads him to distance in a radically different way from any other distancing and ideological or cultural estrangement that we can find in the rest of contemporary literatures. “