memòria

To conclude this series of articles, Jorge Carrión, the writer and curator of the exhibition Sebald Variations –to which this blog is a companion piece – retraces the steps of the German author to weave together a canvas of the spaces and worlds that shaped Sebald’s universe. We travel alongside Carrión and Sebald – it could not have been otherwise – through landscapes, cities, bookshops, railway stations, characters, writers and countless literary echoes. ‘Because our obligation is to be witnesses, although we don’t know exactly what to…’

Once, in Valparaiso, I thought I had discovered the key to Sebald’s writing in a book by him I had borrowed. Over the years, I forgot the title and the sentence. Now that I am borrowing, at random, another book by him, I wonder what those few lines were: lines that seemed so crucial to me ten years ago.

W.G. Sebald’s life and work confront every biographer with the deliberate fictionalization of everyday events in the author’s biography—a constant theme in his postmodernist, semi-documentary and autobiographical writing. Five key events from his inner as well as outer lives are described, ranging from the bombing of Germany at his birth to his relationships with his father and maternal grandfather and finally to his emigration and a key biographical event for the beginning of his writing.