Lerner, Cusk, Greenwell, Hemon, Cole, Dyer, Self, Sinclair, Craig, Hamburger . . . The list of Anglophone writers who bear a real or critically imposed debt to the German W. G. Sebald feels endless and has been repeated to the point of tedium. This attests less to the critical fervor accrued around Sebald’s influence over the past quarter century (though his 2001 death still feels recent) than to an obvious truth. His method, if there was one, was “modular and scalable; from an infinity of information, one need only choose a few data points and thread their repetitions through a series of different contexts,” as Ryan Ruby wrote in a review of Carole Angier’s feeble 2021 Sebald biography, Speak, Silence. It would seem, put differently, quite straightforward: see a photograph in a book, or a narrator who sees a mosquito and remembers a seventeenth-century Viennese naturalist’s trip to Spain, and call the thing Sebaldian. There was a point of saturation, around the early years of the previous decade, where everyone worth reading became a Sebaldian. Finding a more influential author over the past three decades would prove a challenge. Sebald’s only peers in terms of critical devotion accrued on this side of Y2K, as the Costa Rican and Puerto Rican writer Carlos Fonseca points out in his essay on the German, are David Foster Wallace and Roberto Bolaño. We could perhaps add Clarice Lispector, but as is the case with many great women writers, her global reception came decades late; Karl Ove Knausgaard, the other possible candidate, feels like a bit of a stretch.
Yet Sebaldianism has not only been a phenomenon within Anglophone letters. In fact, the intensity of Sebald’s reception in Latin American literature since the late 1990s has been at least equally notable, not least because of the intensely political undertones that Sebald’s followers in the region have given their work. Among Sebald’s most devoted readers in Latin America, familiar or unfamiliar to a US readership, we might count the Argentines Ricardo Piglia, Sergio Chejfec, Matías Sierra Bradford, María Gainza, Alan Pauls, Rodrigo Fresán, María Negroni, and Federico Falco; the aforementioned Fonseca; Chileans like Benjamín Labatut, Galo Ghigliotto, and Nona Fernández; the Mexicans Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Margo Glantz, Sergio Pitol, and Juan Villoro; the Colombians Juan Cárdenas and Juan Gabriel Vásquez; and the Guatemalans Eduardo Halfon and Rodrigo Rey Rosa, to name a few. Some Spaniards—chief among them Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Antonio Muñoz Molina—have also been mentioned in Sebald’s wake, but since this essay is about Latin America, I solicit leave to disregard them. What, beyond a preternatural continent-wide good taste, might explain the popularity and influence in Latin America of an ultra-European German writer whose work became available in Spanish only years after its appearance in English?
In his ascendant years of the late 1990s and, most of all, following his death, Sebald became inseparable from the growing influence that US literature in particular, and Anglophone literature more broadly, held on Latin American literature. This North-South relationship has been intensely bilateral since the days of the Bering Strait bridge, but the twentieth century saw both literary worlds come into intensified contact. For instance, William Faulkner was arguably the single most important influence on the most famous Boom generation authors of the 1960s and ’70s, like Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. That generation was itself the product of a US editorial feeding frenzy (and a clever Catalan editor).
The consequential reduction of Latin American literature to the tropes of magical realism by the demands of a global literary market driven by first-world appetites motivated the publication of McOndo, a manifesto anthology edited by the Chilean authors Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez. In the anthology, published in 1996 at around the same time as Sebald’s English debut, The Emigrants, Fuguet and Gómez denounced the international market’s single-minded thirst for magical realism. Referencing the International Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in its opening paragraph—“like the cosmopolitan elder brother of the famous Writers’ Workshop”—their manifesto stands as negative testament to the US’s heightened role in Latin America’s literary ecosystem. Their principal insistence feels, today, obvious yet unfulfilled: Latin America was the land of not only small backward villages, violent generals, and levitating damsels but also cell phones, weed, and the Walkman (it was the ’90s!). Since then, writers and critics have discoursed ad nauseam about this influence: whether Latin American literature can be written in languages that aren’t Spanish (it can), whether living in the first world is some kind of betrayal (it isn’t), and what influence the monetary and career incentive of translation plays in writers’ careers.
The remarkable temporal overlap between Sebaldianism and McOndo suggests that Sebald may not have arrived in Latin America as a German or even straightforwardly English export, but from the US. Even the Times Literary Supplement reviews that made his books’ reputation as modern classics were penned by none other than the ur-American humanist, Susan Sontag. “Is literary greatness still possible?” she asked in the lede of her famous piece on Vertigo, published in 2000 following The Emigrants’ warm reception. “One of the few answers available to English-language readers,” she went on to affirm, “is the work of W. G. Sebald.” Sebald appeared in Spanish in 1996 as well, with The Emigrants, but lacking a Sontag-like endorsement remained, for a time, mostly unknown and trapped in Spain.
Nevertheless, the many Latin American writers who lived outside of Latin America—many of whom were published in McOndo—likely caught wind of him sooner. The Rings of Saturn appeared in 2000, and Austerlitz in 2002, with the remainder of his work being translated into Spanish posthumously. Alas, determining when Sebald’s books arrived in Latin America proves difficult in part because Spanish translations have always arrived late to the continent, if they arrive at all, and Latin Americans tend to find Spanish syntax stilted and alienating to read. Though the existing translations are by no means deficient, anyone who has read Sebald knows that German and English are the two languages in which his writing came most alive.
However, if one was to find an inaugural instant for Sebald’s Latin American reception, one could do worse than the pair of essays, published in 2001 and 2002, that the famous Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo dedicated to his work in her magazine, Punto de vista. Drawing many of the same comparisons as Sebald’s English-language readers—Claudio Magris, Werner Herzog, V. S. Naipaul, Hans Magnus Enzensberger—Sarlo also found two critical points of difference with the Latin American tradition through which to affirm the German’s innovations: English travel writer and memoirist Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, and the Argentine writer Juan José Saer. Endowed with a self-awareness that Sontag’s Cold War liberalism often impeded, Sarlo diagnosed Sebald as “a moralist in a time of discredited moralism.” I should also note that Sarlo references Sebald’s English and German translations, while only mentioning the Spanish in passing. Though that may be partly explained by the importance Sebald assigned those two languages, it also seems likely that she was able to get her hands on the New Directions editions more readily.
It is no surprise that Punto de vista, one of Latin America’s most influential and cosmopolitan journals of criticism, was Sebald’s first receptacle. Not least because another of the magazine’s founding editorial triumvirate, the novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia, was working as a professor in the United States during Sebald’s rise and would have likely encountered Sontag’s essays in that capacity. Indeed, as the poet Nahuel Lardies reminded me when we discussed the subject of this essay, Piglia’s collection El último lector (The Last Reader) begins with a veiled allusion to Thomas Abrams, the character in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn who “has been working on a model of the Temple of Jerusalem for a good twenty years.” Piglia’s character, Russell, works from a house in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires on a model of “Buenos Aires, but modified and altered by the constructor’s madness and microscopic vision.”
Punto de vista published four essays on the German throughout the magazine’s thirty-year run from the late 1970s until 2008, including the two by Sarlo. Another was an article in translation by the German critic Andreas Huyssen, who was ambivalent about Sebald’s controversial essay “Air War and Literature,” dealing with the unrepresented legacy of the Allied firebombing of Germany during World War II. As the critic Estelle Tarica argued in her recent book Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America, Punto de vista was critical in the development of a politics of memory in the aftermath of Argentina’s bloody dictatorship, which ended in 1983. Though Punto de vista’s leaders were not Jewish, they took particular interest in the memory debates around Holocaust remembrance that transpired among German historians throughout the 1990s, in which Sebald’s essay played a prominent role. They saw these debates as models through which to think about remembering the genocidal atrocities that took place in Argentina over the preceding decade. As Tarica shows, the Punto de vista intellectuals were central to developing Argentina’s effective memory culture (which, alas, seems today to have weakened), and Sarlo’s engagement with ideas around Holocaust memory proved critical to the project.
In Argentina, as in the US, Sebald was read most of all as a “Holocaust writer,” a label that he rejected, though the Holocaust was undeniably central to his oeuvre and life. His biographer Carole Angier described him as “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust,” while Richard Eder placed him, in the New York Times review of Austerlitz, with Primo Levi as the two “prime speaker[s] of the Holocaust.” Both claims are problematic for their comparative, near-competitive undertones, but should not minimize Sebald’s sincere commitment to thinking and writing with profound seriousness about genocide. Sarlo’s fascination with Sebald, whose “pathetic intelligence” she commends above all else, likely stemmed from her own interest in representations of the Holocaust, chief among them Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.
The Argentine critic is infamous for her fierce mistrust of testimonial narratives, which were an iconic genre in revolutionary Latin America during the ’60s and ’70s and proliferated, now also via television, in the aftermath of Argentina’s dictatorship. Most testimonies came from survivors of the “task groups” in charge of executing the dictatorship’s genocidal plan. Sarlo, in her 2005 book Tiempo Pasado, denounced testimony as overly reliant on an unsustainable understanding of the survivor’s speech as endowed with a unique and incontestable veracity. Sebald’s work often undermines any sense of epistemological authority in favor of the unstable and the precarious. This much-lauded refusal of what literary scholar Timothy Bewes called a “hierarchy of significance” among the various “tidbits” in which his narrators take an interest proved, for Sarlo, a useful alternative to a troubled idea of testimony.
Sebald arrived on the Argentine literary scene as the wounds of state terror and dictatorship were just beginning to heal via the winding, fragile process that would deposit the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla and his collaborators in prison, though only twenty years after the end of their reign. His work undeniably gave other writers techniques with which to make sense of the tragedies of this recent history. Among them, the Argentine Jewish writer Sergio Chejfec, who tragically passed away last year, wrote an essay titled “Literature: Brief Notes on Stories with Images,” which was published in English in 2002. There, he contrasted Sebald’s novels with the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García’s 1939 memoir as two notable uses of the image within literature, a device which Chejfec used in his own scintillating work and with which Sebald is often associated. (Before I am skewered: no, Sebald did not invent putting images in fiction; yes, I read Nadja, but a lot more people did it after reading The Rings of Saturn.)
Chejfec, whose solipsistic and erudite writing bears an undeniable similarity to Sebald’s, saw the use of images as a product of the “normalization” of narrative “forms of construction,” so that “they need some external validation of their elements in order to endow the meaning of what they transmit with sufficient intensity.” He posited that something like “aesthetic drift,” an openness to other modes of narration or telling, compelled this pursuit of matters that texts could never quite put into words. Sebald was, to Chejfec, the leading inhabitant of a contemporary novelistic tradition that Bewes described, in Free Indirect, as “inhabiting, even forging” a space of disconnection between the world and the text.
Much like Chejfec, other Latin American Sebaldians have also employed these procedures of “aesthetic drift.” Unlike Chejfec’s later work, theirs has assumed a more sharply political garb in seeking to explore their country’s historical atrocities, their ongoing resonances, and the success (or failure) of memory politics. For instance, Carlos Fonseca’s new novel, Austral—which FSG published last May in Megan McDowell’s translation—tells the story of a great author’s unwilling literary executor, a Costa Rican academic living in the US. He travels to Argentina’s northwestern desert plateau where the writer Aliza or Alicia Abravanel founded, prior to her death, a small artistic commune interested in exploring various forms of land art. Abravanel’s work was renowned for its epic span and concern with nature, most notably a tetralogy dealing with each of the four elements: “Her autobiographical impulses dissolved into large natural landscapes where human beings appeared only rarely, punctuating fictions that advanced through history at a tempo far removed from human psychology.” Sound familiar?
In the sequence’s final, unfinished novel, which our protagonist is tasked with readying for publication, Abravanel wrote about Nueva Germania, the Aryan ultranationalist colony founded by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister and her husband in rural Paraguay. Concerned with a scholar’s investigation into that colony as remembered by a child, Abravanel’s novel bears striking resemblance to Sebaldian form. The novel’s apparent title, A Private Language, gestures toward Abravanel’s final years, after a stroke gave her the nickname “the Mute.” Silence, or what Sebald called “a degree of mutedness” in an interview, was a deep pursuit of the German’s prose. Indeed, Fonseca hides a number of subtle references to Sebald, like an image of Wittgenstein’s eyes similar to the one found in the opening pages of Austerlitz. Most important, however, is Fonseca’s explicit concern with white supremacist and Nazi ideology, its oft-forgotten presence in Latin America and how Fonseca’s novel draws connections between fascism and the modes of settler colonial indigenous genocide that characterize the Argentine Northwest. That this very region is presently in the news due to its massive lithium reserves—which will make some “entrepreneurs” very wealthy and leave its already impoverished population even more destitute—is no accident.
Very reminiscent of Austral, Chilean writer and editor Galo Ghigliotto’s Museum of Fog will be published by Selkies House next year in Thomas Bunstead’s translation. That novel, published first in 2019, fictionalizes the catalog of a museum in Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost reach of Chile and Argentina. The island has been a site of intense exterminationist anti-indigenous violence against the Selk’nam and other indigenous people ever since Magellan crossed its strait to reach the Pacific in 1520. Enlivening the material traces of that island’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century permanent settlement and colonization, and making often moving use of images, Ghigliotto weaves history with observation à la Sebald and applies it to settler colonial processes of destitution through one of its fundamental institutions: the museum.
Ryan Ruby’s argument around the ease with which Sebald’s technique lends itself to appropriation is not incorrect. That Fonseca and Ghigliotto, among many others before and after, found it useful for illuminating forms of violence erased or minimized by normative historical narratives proves, nevertheless, that there might be something to what the German had to offer.
Postscript
As those among my readers most familiar with Sebald and the Latin American corpus I am referencing may have already noticed, much of what I have said so far is flawed, if not outright incorrect. I do not mean that Sebald bears no influence on Latin American literature, nor that Chejfec, Fonseca, or Ghigliotto did not read him. Yet what a US reader might recognize as the “Sebaldian” has existed, in one way or another, in Latin American literature since about 1493. Indeed, the contestatary first-person historical novel/memoir has been a central genre in the region since what many regard as the first Latin American novel, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s 1568 The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. In that book, written when Hernán Cortés’s former underling was nearing death and suffering from a guilty conscience, the atrocities and tragedies of the Mexican conquest came to life.
One recent instance of a Sebaldian historical novel, Juan Cárdenas’s Peregrino transparente (Transparent Pilgrim), was published earlier this year and tells the story of the nineteenth-century English painter Henry Price’s travels in Colombia. Describing Peregrinación de Alpha (Alpha’s Pilgrimage), a nineteenth-century travel narrative authored by Manuel Ancízar and which the narrator retells in free indirect discourse, he writes: “As happens with many Latin American books from that time, the Pilgrimage mixes the adventure novel, the sociological notes journal, the inventory of natural prodigies, the longhand ethnography or the accumulation of traditions and popular rumors. These sorts of books tend to be exceptional to the extent that, in order to invent a country, they must construct a very strange literary genre, some sort of Frankenstein’s monster which reflects, moreover, a certain dilettantism that characterizes intellectuals in that region of the world.” This is by no means an interpellation of Sebald, but rather a succinct statement of the condition of Latin American literature as the independent settler nation-state replaced the colonial state. The similarities between Peregrinación de Alpha and what I have been calling the Sebaldian suggest that the method for which the German was so congratulated has lived at the heart of Latin American literature from the start. From Magellan’s journals to the Araucana to Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle to Domingo Sarmiento’s semi-fictionalized biography Facundo, Latin America has—pardon my French—always already been Sebaldian.
The similarities to Sebald extend into the twentieth century. Sergio Chejfec, who I suggested was often compared to our beloved German, suggested that the comparison “made him somewhat uncomfortable” because he felt that Sebald “meant to transmit, in his work, something very concrete to do with the history and culture of Europe. There’s also a sense of culpability made manifest in his books.” I would go even further to suggest that the books for which Chejfec became a major figure in Argentine literature—his first two, Lenta biografía (Slow Biography) and The Planets—seem to approach the Sebaldian in their languorous and melancholy first-person, most often a man who wanders around the city. Their concerns include historical memory, Jewish culture, the interminable grief of disappearance and genocide: classic Sebaldian themes. Though they were published in 1990 and 1999, respectively, each novel bears the mark of an earlier composition, the former around 1984 and the latter around 1994, which would position them avant Sebald.
It surprises no one that Chejfec was often asked about Sebald. That the inverse was flat-out laughable proves both the (I hope) obvious asymmetries that govern the literary market and a certain critical habit to presume—as I did in the first half of this essay—that influence is not only unidirectional but top-down, flowing like honey from Europe to Latin America. This presumption has marred readings of Sebald, which have listed among his influences everyone from Thomas Browne to Baudelaire and Chateaubriand to Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka. Alas, one name that goes somewhat unmentioned or at least underdiscussed as a precursor to Sebald is that of Jorge Luis Borges, whose “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” features prominently in The Rings of Saturn through references and multiple extensive discussions. To read Sebald, for me, is to know that he could not have written without Borges, perhaps the most Latin American of all writers despite his image outside of the region.
To be clear: some critics have attended to this connection. “Tlön,” published in Borges’s landmark collection Ficciones, narrates a scholarly conspiracy to fabricate, via the encyclopedia, a parallel and “orderly” planet (comparable to “dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism”) that ultimately threatens to supplant reality, whatever that was. In its famous closing paragraph, Borges’s narrator insists that he will “pay no attention to all this and go on revising . . . an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial,” refusing Tlön’s totalizing, homogenizing invasion of the world through the retreat into literary life. Gabriele Eckart has read Sebald’s various references to the piece as extending Borges’s “historical pessimism” and rejection of progress à la Walter Benjamin, suggesting that Sebald does not wish to “create a new Tlön” but rather produce “a kind of metacommentary about history that produces order with a view to dismantle it from the inside.” For her, Sebald follows Borges’s attempt to demolish the “Enlightenment discourse of instrumental rationality”: lazy binarisms, utopian thought, and progressivist philosophy.
More importantly, Sebald’s tone and frame of reference—from Thomas Browne to the encyclopedia to medieval bestiaries—feels inseparable from Borges’s own unique form of late erudition. Eckart wrongly argues that Sebald, unlike Borges, “mixes different types of texts—as, for instance, documentary, biography or lyrical exclamation, fact and fiction,” a statement evidencing an unfamiliarity with Borges’s oeuvre that Sebald thankfully did not share. To read Sebald is, for us other Sebaldians, to reencounter at least a figment of the Borgesian enchantment extended into the novelistic form that Borges rejected and transmuted. Put differently, and in extremis, what I am suggesting is that what I once called the Sebaldianism of Latin American authors is, at least in part, a reformulated and extended Borgesianism. This should not minimize Sebald’s originality—my appreciation for him is evident—but rather suggest that the problem of influence may be less linear than is often thought, and that to attribute European origin to every formal and aesthetic development can prove misleading. After all, where else were all those eighteenth-century aesthetes traveling, if not to Latin America and the rest of what they made into the the third world?
What I have called Latin American Sebaldianism emerges, in part, from a centuries-old literary tradition to which Sebald himself was, I think, a knowing heir. This essay, were it ever to be truly written, should not concern itself with the laundry list of Latin American Sebaldians with which I began, but with Sebald’s obfuscated Latin Americanism. The Anglophone Sebaldians become chimeric in such a rereading, confused Borgesians who wander the streets of New York or the islands of Greece deceived by the mist of their own misunderstood literary ancestry. To reincorporate Latin American literature as an antecedent, then, might also allow us to consider that the world, like Borges’s Aleph or Piglia’s model of Buenos Aires, may be found sitting, untouched and ever-changing, in some Flores basement. 
Federico Perelmuter is a writer. He lives in Buenos Aires.
