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Re: Help! Life after Paul Auster ?

Hello - I have an author for you!!

W.G. Sebald - a German expat who lived in UK and wrote in German. His work is BRILLIANT - and somewhat Auster-esque. Sebald too writes about memory, existance, reality, illusion, history. I'm so excited that none of these posts mention him, because I am deep into reading everything he's ever written and I must say he comes so close.

A couple points regarding this thread:

Timbucktu is not a failure. It is an incredible alagory about consciousness that succeeds completely.

Murikami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is a masterwork - challenging but still cohesive. I think it's agreat and treads some of the same Austerian ground, but is much more Japanese and modern (closer to Delillo).

Re: Help! Life after Paul Auster ?

Sorry - forgot to mention some W.G. Sebald titles.

I started with Vertigo. Perhaps better to start with Rings of Saturn. Austerlitz is a towering slab of genius. After Nature is a rumination on art, artists and nature. Just read it all.

Re: Re: Help! Life after Paul Auster ?

Well thank you very much for sharing your great enthusiasm about this author. But we seem (and that's a good thing) to have very different tastes since I found timbuktu was a real let down (the only one for the whole of Paul Auster's writings) and disliked Murakami (the book I read, kafka on the shore, was rather quite bad (the one with the cat-language-speaking-mentally-ill character meeting a character dressed as the Johnnny Walker Whisky Logo - , very MTV, but not really insightful). But hey, maybe I should try another one as, after all, had I started Auster with timbuktu I wouldn't have carried on, and what a mistake that would have been...)

Still, I've checked up on WG Sebald, and while he seems to receive a lot of praise and I have little doubt he's an outstanding writer, the themes he's writing about are (once again) post WWII and the Holocaust and post nazi germany trauma, or some immediate after war travels around Europe. Very grounded in reality and yes, about memory, but actual collective memory, to the point his work his often described as as social history. Just not the fictional all created imaginay environment I'm longing for from auster's books. Indeed I fail to see the connection with Auster. Or if there's one I'm affraid it's too remote for me.

I'm sure WG seblad is a fantastic writer, but I must seek and try to find someone closer, which is the object of this thread.