A Place in the Country (Modern Library Classics)

W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country is a meditation on six artists and writers who influenced his creative mind, and it is the last major work of this great writer to be translated into English. The edition includes over 40 pieces of original art personally selected by Sebald.

This exceptional collection of interconnected essays about place, memory, and creativity delves into the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his enigmatic, part critical essay, part memoir style, Sebald intertwines their lives and art with his own experiences and rise in the literary world. These are individuals blessed with talent and courage, yet sometimes burdened by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries that are unwelcoming or even hostile to them.

Sebald brings to life Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, evading his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where Sebald himself later stayed. Eighteenth-century writer Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite nature writing. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his novel Green Henry, is praised for his perceptive insights into a Germany in turmoil.

Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the 19th-century German poet beset by mood swings and depression, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose writing seemed to aim at self-obliteration. Finally, Sebald recognizes painter Jan Peter Tripp’s acknowledgment of death’s inevitability in his reproductions of life.

With suggestive illustrations similar to those in Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait viewed through the experiences of others, revealing his own ghosts alongside those who influenced him. This work is an essential addition to his remarkable body of work.

Critics have hailed A Place in the Country as “hypnotic,” “measured,” and “sardonic.” Sebald’s writing is described as “everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death,” transformed into “something beautiful and unsettling.” The book has been praised for its seamless, multiple layers, and it has been called Sebald’s most tender and jovial work, describing the experience of reading it as akin to “going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”

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