Customer Reviews

After Nature

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The literary world stil mourns the too early passing of W.G. Sebald, who died just as his fertile mind was being shared with us through his four novels. Few people who experienced the power of his talent in reading 'The Emmigrants', 'Vertigo', 'The Rings of Saturn", and his final 'Austerlitz' have been able to reconcile the loss of a man so gifted having his career so shortened. Sebald is a writer's writer but his book, while dense in content and style, spoke so clearly to our generation beseiged by media madness, global wars, terrorism, starvation, and mutilation of the environment that turning to his unique form of writing provided a great solace. He asked us to explore the mysteries of birth, of death, of aging, of remembering and honoring our personal and cultural past. Now, after his death, we are gifted by this amazingly beautiful volume of three poems he wrote at the inception of his writing career. Knowing that these elegant and brilliant poems have been available all these years - just not translated - brings the circle of life round in a way I feel certain Sebald would have enjoyed.

The poems are in free verse and read easily; the content is typical of Sebald, in that he relates detailed histories of painter Matthias Gruenwald, botanist Georg Stellar, and himself - each man being described as one who explores life from his passion to understand his past and future and find meaning and peace at its core. Rarely has language appeared so fluid, elegant, informative and lovely as in Sebald's informed hands. This is a book to savour and to share........a magnificent volume.

This triptych prose poem actually was published before Sebald's prose books. The word 'poem' is a loose word here, as words like 'fiction' and 'novel' were in "Austerlitz", "Vertigo", "Rings of Saturn" and "The Emigrants". This poem is a progenitor of the later work, and has much of the same agenda as the books.

"After Nature" follows three characters: Grunewald, a Renaissance painter, Steller, an 18th century botanist-explorer, and finally the author himself. The book is preoccupied and troubled by the slow devastation of nature and innocence by history and man, and the book's end, as Sebald himself imagines looking onto the virgin continent of Africa in the times of Alexander the Great, is eloquent and beautifully melancholy as only a Sebald work can be.

This is as luminous and hypnotic as writing can be, and literature will sorely miss the genius of W.G. Sebald, who passed away far too early, at the height of his literary powers, in December of 2001.

I really don't feel I can do this beautiful book justice but I loved it so much I feel compelled to try.

"After Nature" is written even less conventionally than are Sebald's other books. "After Nature" is a rather longish prose poem that details the unique relationship between three very different men and nature, herself. The three men are Matthias Grunewald, the German Renaissance painter, Georg Steller, the scientist and Arctic explorer and Sebald, himself.

Each one of the men named above begins life with a vision of Nature that is placid and benevolent but come to realize that Nature can often be cruel and can even destroy her own creations. Each man was changed by his experience with Nature; whether for better or worse is something each reader will have to judge for himself.

Sebald was an enormously creative and original writer and he defined himself as a "writer" rather than a novelist. While "After Nature" certainly isn't conventionally plotted there are remnants of stories contained within the poetry. Sebald, however, makes the reader work a little in order to obtain a full understanding of "After Nature." The book may look "easy" but believe me, it's not.

"After Nature" is a beautiful book and, like the ones that followed, its beauty is melacholic. If you need a conventionally plotted work or a page turning storyline, however, "After Nature" wouldn't be the right choice for you. This is a very introspective work and the more you read, the more inward looking the book becomes.

I loved "After Nature." I think I loved it even more than Sebald's other books. "After Nature" made me think more and reflect more and it stayed with me far longer.

If a very reflective, introspective and melancholic prose poem is something you think you'd enjoy, I don't think you could find anything lovlier than "After Nature."

This triptych of three long poems by W.G. Sebald is a jewel-like ornament to his four major prose works, "Vertigo," "The Emigrants," "The Rings of Saturn" and "Austerlitz." I found the first and third poems, dealing with the shadowy German Renaissance painter Matthias Grunewald and with Sebald himself, superior to the second section, on Arctic exploration, but I fully expect other readers to judge for themselves and judge differently. The burning power of what is best in all of Sebald's works is encapsulated in a few lines from the third poem here, describing Sebald's reaction after viewing a painting of the destruction of Sodom in the Kunsthistorisches Museum:

When for the first time I saw

this picture the year before last,

I had the strange feeling

of having seen all of it

before, and a little later,

crossing to Floridsdorf

on the Bridge of Peace,

I nearly went out of my mind.

This is not a book to be skimmed lightly. The middle poem on the botanist Georg Steller is the most transparent. It provides not only a biography of Steller's explorations with Bering, but insight into the nature-man relationship. The first poem on the 16th century painter Matthias Grunewald is less transparent - less biographical information is available. Sebald again explores the nature-man relationship. The reader, however, must glean their understanding of Grunewald's painting through Sebald's description and from this understanding move towards Sebald's interpretation. The third poem is on Sebald himself, exploring the same nature-man relationship. At times it becomes a "cat and mouse" game as Sebald exhibits both reserve and openess.

If you enjoy Sebald's prose, this is a must-read. If you enjoy less traditional literary presentation, consider this a must-read. For the rest, read the various reviews to determine your interest level - it would never be a mistake to choose this volume. But there is so much wonderful literature and so little time to read, that you may wish to invest your time elsewhere.

Indeed, the poetry of this volume does mesmerize. I agree with the first reviewer above. However, it is a tremendous disappointment and disservice to poetry readers that the fine translations remain unaccompanied by the poems in German. For this reason the volume itself deserves a lower mark, but the poetry is enchanted and needs to be read.

The poems encourage lingering and mindful meditation on the natural world and on our abilities and means to apprehend it. Not all in this Arcadia is idyllic. The poems recall for me the mood of some of Vergil's bucolic poems (lines from Eclogue I serve as an epigraph to the final section) and resemble, at times, less intensely infused metaphysical quests, along the lines of Eliot's Quartets. It would be a pity to miss reading these poems. It would have been splendid to have them shining from the page opposite their original German forms.