A Place in the Country

W. G. Sebald's meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind and the last of this great writer's major works to be translated into English.

A Place in the Country walks the tightrope between critical essay and memoir. In this collection of six interlocking portraits of writers and artists, we see W. G. Sebald returning to his geographic and literary roots. The six portraits merge into one self-portrait and give the reader a glimpse into Sebald's own creative process.

The six biographical meditations on Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gottfried Keller, Eduard Mörike, Robert Walser, and the painter Jan Peter Tripp evoke Sebald's fiction in both style and form. They use the same method of melding place, time, and circumstance into an aesthetic whole. Unexplained images accompany the essays. And as in the novels, the landscape, or sense of place, provides the thread that binds all six essays together and links them to Sebald himself. A Place in the Country is, then, both a tribute to six artists who accompanied Sebald in my suitcase, as he says, on his own path of voluntary emigration and artistic maturity, and a self-portrait of one of the late twentieth century's most unique and lasting writers.