After Nature

Born in Germany in 1944, W G Sebald settled in England to become Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was acclaimed for four seminal works of fiction, and Austerlitz, his final and best-known book, received widespread praise before his untimely death in December 2001. Now his first literary work is published in English for the first time. Taking the form of a long prose poem written in blank verse, it explores the fundamental conflict between man and nature in a highly personalized and potent fashion. Sebald divides his poem into three distinct parts. First he writes from the perspective of the 15th-century artist known as Grunewald, a painter possessed of an extraordinarily tortured perception of the human condition whose real identity is still in doubt. Just as Sebald sees this mysterious artist's distorted images as providing a conduit into creation, so he manipulates the life of Georg Wilhelm Steller, the theologian turned natural scientist who forms the focus of the second section of the book. Finally, in the third part, Sebald examines his own history. 'How far,' he asks, 'must one go back to find the beginning?' In the words of the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, Sebald was in his last five years beginning to reap the harvest of a lifetime's immaculate thinking, and After Nature is now imbued with a poignant irony Sebald could not have forseen. At the height of his powers Grunewald faded abruptly into a twilight he still inhabits; Georg Steller did not live to see the publication of his zoological masterpiece. It can only be hoped Sebald's straining for a primordial truth will survive him. (Kirkus UK)