I have entered a phase of my life where I feel more and more like a middle-aged dad and I can tell this because I love biographies and autobiographies. And while I understand some people's issues with this particular biography (the fact that Angler did not have full access to Sebald's papers, the speculations), I loved it. In fact, I would say that I loved it even more because of what others perceive as the book's flaws.

In terms of content, this was a beautiful weaving of Sebald's life and also a critical interpretation of his work. It is a detailed biography that does not mince its words about Sebald's life and flaws, but also presents him in a way that is so human because of these flaws.

But I think the reason why I find myself so enthralled with this biography is the way it plays directly and perhaps unconsciously at times too with my favorite topics: the fallibility of memory; the pleasures, pains and limits of narrative to make sense of a life; how when we write about others we are often enough writing about ourselves.

The thing with "Speak Silence" is that Sebald's own work plays so beautiful into these very themes, making this a very meta biography that is a pleasure to read not only because of the life it conveys, but also because of the question it raises and how it allows me to play with ideas and language. A book that is also a bit of a puzzle regarding form. I devoured it.

Carole Angier's biography of German genius-writer W G Sebald. is the first.

In her only interview with him, he totally misled her in certain respects and, fuelled by the knowledge that he could be duplicitous, she searches out likely and unlikely sources for what at times is a forensic audit of the influence of his life on his writing, of how the autobiographical raw material was transformed into masterpieces such as Austerlitz and Rings of Saturn and of how he often misrepresented his method.

While Sebald's wife and daughter did not cooperate, his two sisters did, which gives an extra dimension to the account of his early life

Thus is a superb work of intricate investigation but is very readable and will be mined by every Sebald scholar.

A very detailed biography of one of the 20th Century's greatest writers - WG Sebald, whose very work is difficult to categorise but whose influence is vast (both perhaps shown by the now common use of the term Sebaldian to describe a certain type of writing as well as - more lazily - the use of slightly out of focus black and white photographs).

The book concentrates on Sebald's prose books and less on his academic writing or poetry - which I have to say suited me (I have little interest in academia)

It is a lengthy book - over 650 pages - but around 200 pages are Acknowledgments/Links /Abbreviations/Notes and an Index (not completed in the Proof I read).

There is always a tension in biographies between official ones and unofficial ones. Official ones have access to inside information and privileged insights. But sometimes as a result are constrained in what they can present and in the gloss they need to put on incidents..

The author makes it clear up front that this is more of an unauthorised biography and that particularly: she was not able to speak to either Sebald's widow (and so could not quote from many private letters etc); did not have official agreement to quote from his published works or interviews (other than the "limits laid down by [copyright] law); that two other key sources (a friend and Simon Prosser - Sebald's editor for his last books – who I know best as Ali Smith’s editor) also declined to talk to her.

She also identifies up front that she never really gets to the bottom of the solitude and pessimism which permeates not just his work but seemingly his life.

The advantage of being unauthorised is that she is able to present an unvarnished picture of him. Starting of course with the comment about his aloneness “the people he loved must have felt alone too”.

Later she is fairly explicit about the hurt felt by his first English language publisher Harvill (who supported him when he was completely unknown) when after some initial success he deserted them and allowed his agent Andrew Wiley to turn their “offer into the opening bid in an auction and invited the biggest publishers in London and New York to take part” (a repeat of a similar falling out with his first German publisher). She makes it clear that for all his torn loyalty Sebald’s real focus was on earning enough to escape academia and be an independent writer.

The incident in which he comes out worst is in his difficult relationship with his first English translator Michael Hulse – which continued to be extremely difficult through a number of translations. This is a fascinating part of the book as the author actually includes some pages of “The Rings of Saturn” with Hulse’s translation and Sebald’s edits (as well as those of his trusted secretary). The biographer puts the bulk of the blame for the difficult relationship on Sebald both in not communicating his issues ot Hulse directly “silence began in kindness, but soon became cowardice and finally betrayal” and in his motivations – but she does conclude in an interesting paragraph

"There are to simplify horribly – two poles of thought about translation. One holds that the job is to render the work as beautifully as possible in the new language. The other holds that the job is rather to convey the original as closely as possible. (The ideal is to do both, of course, but like most ideals it’s not always achievable.) Max was strongly of the second school, while Michael’s gift lay in the first. The result was that Michael wholly Englished – and Hulse’d – Max’s language, and Max furiously re-Germanised and re-Sebaldised it again. He worked almost as long and hard on Michael’s translations as he’d done on his own originals, rewriting almost every line. And the result of that, in my view, was remarkable, and the best of both worlds. He had a poet’s flowing English version before him, to which he restored his own unique sound, to make a whole new work of art. In my view, in that of everyone at Harvill, and in that of most English reviewers and readers, Max’s books as translated by Michael Hulse, then rewritten by Max himself, are great works of English literature, different from but equal to Austerlitz."

Some other Norfolk/Suffolk related tidbits I found of interest were:

Sebald’s notoriously bad driving as seen for years by his neighbour when they lift shared on the Wymondham-Norwich roads (ones I drive parallel to on the A11 when driving between my Surrey and Norfolk homes) and which of course ultimately cost him his life years later;

The solution to the mystery (to me) of how someone on an academic salary purchased a fabulous Old Rectory – the Rectory was completely derelict and he spent years doing it up.

That “Rings of Saturn” actually started life conceived by Sebald as an easy way to get paid for his writing – as a walking holiday which he would then turn into “a piece about remote Suffolk for German tourists” – “ten short pieces” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine magazine

Now of course much of his walk took place at different times and in different places than he says in his writing

This deliberate duplicity of course permeates much of Sebald’s writing – hence why it is fiction, as well as his photographs and even his interviews – the author reveals that there is a well-known Sebald tale about the Emigrants which he told to her, which she included in her interview and which was been by others repeated often as a fact ever since but which she discovered in her researches for this book was entirely made up)

"Those photographs and documents that made them all so real to us – what are we to make of them now? If the characters are fictions, who are the photographs of? And suddenly they flip. Where first they created an extraordinary closeness, now they create distance; instead of feeling intensely with the people pictured, we’re asking, Who are you? Precisely the technique Sebald adopted to make his creations real to us now makes us more aware they’re not real than if we had simply been left to imagine them, as in a normal novel. This is a circle he cannot escape from, like several others in his life. And my book traps him in it. If you read him without questioning, and are moved – that is his main aim. I remind you of the truth. That is the job of the biographer. It’s why writers don’t want biographers, and I know Sebald wouldn’t want me. But I would say to him, You’re wrong. You always wanted people to believe your stories. But they will believe them more, not less, when they know the truth."

But perhaps the enduring strength in the book are the closing chapters on each of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz and then on Sebald’s overall literary legacy. These function (particularly when set in the context of the previous chapters) as invaluable companions to Sebald’s writing – and for any fan of his writing I would suggest to get this biography (in hard copy rather than electronic) as a reference volume for your bookshelf alongside his great works.

“Normal experience was a trauma” (p.437)

This is a skilfully constructed biography about Sebald’s ‘artist’s disease’ (p.437) - his ‘mad perfectionism’ (p.85) and habit of embroidering the truth: ‘to see the fiction in facts, and tell the one without (or almost without) departing from the other’, (p.265).

The overwhelming tone is one of emotional separation, writerly obsession, and melancholy. His biography, it seems, can be boiled down to the transition from angry young man to depressive old man without a barely perceptible gap in the middle. Oh my! Perhaps the refusal of Sebald’s family to contribute to this book left a human-shaped hole in the middle. The author does repeatedly note that most of those who knew him tended to worship him!

For Sebald, it seems, the writer faces an impossible duty to make genuine space for memory and justice, against the grain of a banal unheeding world. Like a craftsman he needed to wrest truth from its tomb of compromised words and thoughts. This would take literary roughness, stealing fire, heating, hammering and bending fact to the truer truth of art. It sounds like this was draining - the author makes a nice comparison with the artist Frank Auerbach’s working methods and this mid-century notion of art as a existential trial of strength strongly reminded me of James Lord’s biography of Giacometti.

The aggression required was evident, as with Giacometti and Auerbach. Few of Sebald’s informants or sources appreciated his literary transformation of their intimate biographical detail. And his love of making his writing a kind of puzzle, setting traps for the unwary, pre-positions the reader as a kind of foe. The final chapters outline, very helpfully, the nature of some of those traps in his more popular books - and some of his working methods.

Giving this through biography only 4-stars is a bit unfair (it is a major achievement), but I kept comparing it with Lord on Giacometti or even Sykes' biography of Hockney - in each case the biographer empathetically set the artist's vision in its context, rather than making it seem (entirely) isolated, exiled, and lost.

Firstly, it's worth saying that anyone put off by the page count should know that the text finishes at 70% and the rest is notes, references and bibliography.

Secondly, this is far from an objective biography - Angier writes herself into her quest for Sebald and almost mimics his texts with the inset black and white photos and the merging of genres: this is part conventional biography, part memoir, part literary commentary on Sebald's work.

My one question is a methodological one: Angier reaches a conclusion that Sebald's life informed his books, but I wondered to what extent she might have constructed his life <i>from</i> his books, drawing parallels backwards, as it were, from his narrators to the author? She uncovers how Sebald lied about his 'real' life, fictionalising it; but also how he got frustrated with the rigour of scholarly writing and so made up references and sources. She finds the latter forgivable since it is a Sebaldian way of merging invention, imagination and truth - but something that is a creative possibility in fiction becomes more like deception, even unprofessionalism, in academic writing.

It's striking, too, how Angier unpicks themes such as coincidence and unexpected connections which drive Sebald's fiction and finds them in his life, not least in terms of his final accident (or was it?) and death.

I don't know enough about Sebald to quantify these misgivings so they're really just methodological questions that I couldn't help asking myself. But Angier is a sensitive reader, for sure, and it's as a commentary on Sebald's literary works that I found this most rich and productive.