FICTION/MEMOIR/TRAVEL is the convenient catch all classification that the publishers have placed on the back cover of all the novels by the German writer W.G. Sebald. In several of his books Sebald includes snippets of found photographs, obscure diagrams, snaps that he has taken himself (in black and white) and old postcards that he has picked up on his various excursions. These pictures don’t help with the clarity of the writing at all, but they add another layer to the story he is telling, an authentication.
Have the photographs been created to justify the fiction? Is what Sebald is describing really what you are looking at in the badly creased image or is he making it up?
