Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag Page A

America, with a good deal of condescension and often in racist terms. A writer from these countries is far likelier to know any of the European literatures or literature in English than to know the literature of Brazil, whereas Brazilian writers are acutely aware of Spanish-American literature. Borges, the other supremely great writer produced on that continent, seems never to have read Machado de Assis. Indeed, Machado is even less well known to Spanish-language readers than to those who read him in English. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas was finally translated into Spanish only in the 1960s, some eighty years after it was written and a decade after it was translated (twice) into English.
    With enough time, enough afterlife, a great book does find its rightful place. And perhaps some books need to be rediscovered again and again. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is probably one of those thrillingly original, radically skeptical books that will always impress readers with the force of a private discovery. It hardly seems much of a compliment to say that this novel, written more than a century ago, seems, well … modern. Isn’t every work that speaks to us with an originality and lucidity we’re capable of acknowledging one we want to conscript into what we understand as modernity? Our standards of
modernity are a system of flattering illusions, which permit us selectively to colonize the past, as are our ideas of what is provincial, which permit some parts of the world to condescend to all the rest. Being dead may stand for a point of view that cannot be accused of being provincial. Surely The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is one of the most entertainingly unprovincial books ever written. And to love this book is to become a little less provincial about literature, about literature’s possibilities, oneself.
    [1990]

A Mind in Mourning
    IS LITERARY GREATNESS still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.
    Vertigo, the third of Sebald’s books to be translated into English, is how he began. It appeared in German in 1990, when its author was forty-six; three years later came The Emigrants; and two years after that, The Rings of Saturn. When The Emigrants appeared in English in 1996, the acclaim bordered on awe. Here was a masterly writer, mature, autumnal even, in his persona and themes, who had delivered a book as exotic as it was irrefutable. The language was a wonder—delicate, dense, steeped in thinghood; but there were ample precedents for that in English. What seemed foreign as well as most persuasive was the preternatural authority of Sebald’s voice: its gravity, its sinuosity, its precision, its freedom from all-undermining or undignified self-consciousness or irony.
    In W. G. Sebald’s books, a narrator who, we are reminded occasionally, bears the name W. G. Sebald, travels about registering evidence of the mortality of nature, recoiling from the ravages of
modernity, musing over the secrets of obscure lives. On some mission of investigation, triggered by a memory or news from a world irretrievably lost, he remembers, evokes, hallucinates, grieves.
    Is the narrator Sebald? Or a fictional character to whom the author has lent his name, and selected elements of his biography? Born in 1944, in a village in Germany he calls “W.” in his books (and the dust jacket identifies for us as Wertach im Allgäu), settled in England in his early twenties, and a career academic currently teaching modern German literature at the University of East Anglia, the author includes a scattering of allusions to these bare facts and a few others, as well as, among other self-referring documents reproduced in his books, a grainy picture of