After Nature

Translated for the first time into English, Sebald's first literary work is a beautiful and cosmically unsettling prose-poem meditation on the ceaseless cycles of destruction and rebirth, natural and man-made, that are both inheritance and destiny. nAfter Nature, W. G. Sebald's first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind's place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance. The first figure is the great German Re-naissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages. nAfter Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author's position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.n