“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.” More than two decades after Sebald’s death, reviewers, literary critics, and bloggers (including this one) are still labeling writers “Sebaldian,” writers who, for the most part, nearly all use the English language. “Yet Sebaldianism has not only been a phenomenon within Anglophone letters,” writes Federico Perelmuter in an essay “Sebald and His Precursors” in the latest issue of the Southwest Review. “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.” Perelmuter proceeds to name some twenty Latin American writers and three from Spain—all writing in Spanish—who have been “among Sebald’s most devoted readers.”
Perelmuter first writes about some of the reasons that Sebald’s books found a welcoming audience in Latin America. Then, he turns to the topic indicated by the title of his piece.
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. . . 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.
Perelmuter’s essay is a valuable contribution to the discussion about Sebald’s influence. But, more importantly, it’s just a fabulous essay about literature, and it gave me the names of several new writers whose books I’m anxious to read.
By the way, I have written more than once about two of the writers that play important roles in Perelmuter’s essay. I’ve written about four books by Ricardo Piglia and three books by Sergio Chejfec, both of whom were Argentinian writers.