“W.G. Sebald: A Profile”

Out from behind a paywall at The Paris Review, James Atlas’s “W.G. Sebald: A Profile.” An excerpt:

When I asked his London agent, Victoria Edwards, what he was like, she said she’d never met him. Like his peripatetic narrator, he liked to go for walks in all weather; twice when I called, his wife told me he was “out with the dogs.” The notion of a literary profile bewildered him. “I am glad you liked The Emigrants and quite astounded that you propose to come all the way to talk to me,” he’d written in reply to my request for an interview.

Yesterday afternoon I pulled from a shelf three books by Sebald I haven’t yet read. Finding this profile available online feels like a sign that it’s time to read them.

Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)

[The text of the profile appears to have been scanned, with conspicuous errors. But it’s free. The books I have read: Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and a collection of interviews.]