This Book Argues that Sebald's unusual and idiosyncratic prose fiction, which privileges the use of language and the imagination, engages the reader in ways that encourage “disobedience,” licensing the reader, as it were, to step outside the elided or effaced textual boundaries into her own empirical otherness, and to bring into what Rupert Sheldrake describes as the contiguity of morphic fields that generative and transactional connectivity that is a form of dialogism and an antidote to the essential human condition of isolation or loneliness. Plato's invention of the philosophical dialogue, growing out of the need for an interrogative other to ask the questions that Plato could explore, underpins the transactional nature of the dialogue between the reader and the text, the author and the text, which reflects this need for critical engagement, a condition brought to a kind of crisis in an age where the collapse of the old illusions and metanarratives (in Jean-François Lyotard's estimate) has engendered a state of anxiety about our lack of future manifest in our preoccupation with the past and its consoling sense of identity, as Peter Conrad avers.

In the introduction I begin by sketching the circumstances in which I came to Sebald, mapping some of the ways in which we can be engaged by this fascinating writer, whose unusual books and idiosyncratic approach to writing caused such a stir in the popular media when they first appeared.

In chapter 1, I map the life of the man and the emerging profile of the writer as he was constructing himself in the production of his texts. I deal with some of the biographical details of Max Sebald that were made available in interviews over the comparatively short period of time between the first translation into English in 1996 and his death in 2001. A full-length biography is, at the time of this writing, still forthcoming. I also consider the emergence of the writer, both creative and academic, and the language choices he had made.