MixedThe New York Review of BooksSebald, as Angier so meticulously documents, constantly shifts between soliciting and frustrating our confidence in the historical veracity of his work ... It does seem by the end of Speak, Silence that Angier feels she is in possession of the fundamental \'truth\' of Sebald ... I have trouble reconciling this \'truth\' about Sebald with Angier’s belief that he is \'the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust.\' The diagnosis of this \'artist’s disease\' erases both Sebald’s particularity and his capacity to reckon with particulars; it is the image of a person who, as Angier puts it, \'makes no distinction between the herrings and the victims of Bergen-Belsen.\' I want to be clear that I’m in no way suggesting that Angier—a thorough researcher and the daughter, as she says, of Viennese Jews who fled the Nazis—is suggesting that all catastrophe is interchangeable. But if this is somehow Sebald’s truth, it strikes me as a startling indictment, not a defense of the writer. The vertigo I feel reading Speak, Silence is that precisely where it approaches hagiography I find it damning ... Angier seems to me to be imposing an aesthetic pattern on the complexity and contingency of a real life...a contradictory desire to acknowledge contingency even while abstracting it into mythology. I find all this distressing because of what I consider the (subtler) risks of patterning and mythologization within Sebald’s work—that tension between illumination and obfuscation, between exploring the burdens of historical memory and aestheticizing history, of making real people Fates or fated, which denies both agency (that we might change, individually and collectively) and accident ... I also find that Angier’s descriptions of Sebald’s \'truth\'—that everything was trauma, that he suffered for all of us and died for or from his suffering—jar with the revelations and collocations of her patient research, those misrepresentations I began by cataloging ... if Angier is right and he felt authorized to lie in his dissertation because of his \'magical connection\' to Holocaust victims, I again see her ostensibly sympathetic account as an indictment.
