intertextualitat

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.

Born in Wales in 1943, a year before Sebald, Iain Sinclair has written a series of books exploring the themes and territories that are now considered the cornerstones of Sebald’s project. Years before the author of Austerlitz reached the height of his popularity, Sinclair had already brought an encyclopaedic breadth to some of his finest books,  together with a concern to recover forgotten history and the aesthetic of the flâneur in the city. In the short conversation we are presenting here, the writer and journalist  Bruno Galindo takes Sinclair’s work as a starting point in order to follow the traces of  W.G. Sebald in one of the most interesting examples of English prose of the past few decades.

The following article attempts to bring together several approaches to W.G. Sebald’s work, the relevance of which appears to respond to resonances that evoke many of the notions developed by literary and cultural theory in recent decades. Memory, image, temporality, travel and intertextuality comprise a small range of topics that give a good indication of the kaleidoscopic vitality of this German writer.