Speak, Silence is the second major biography published this year about a Kafka-obsessed novelist whose central theme involves the experience of Jews in the turmoil of 20thcentury history. But the two writers couldn’t be more different: Philip Roth was an American Jew, while WG Sebald was a German Catholic whose father served as an officer during the war. Both reacted against their parents’ generation—in Roth’s case, against the pieties of an immigrant culture preserving itself against assimilation, and in Sebald’s, against the Nazis, and his country’s eerie silence on its terrible recent history.
One of Roth’s virtues was his faith in candour (“Just make me interesting,” he told his biographer, who was subsequently embroiled in his own controversy over rape allegations), but one of Sebald’s was his profound sense that certain things are sacred and can only be handled with thick gloves. Which makes him harder to write about. As Carole Angier admits in her preface: “The central absence is his family life, because his widow wishes to keep this private. Without her permission, his words from privately held sources, such as certain letters, cannot be quoted, only paraphrased.” She does well with the materials available, but the gaps also mean that much of the biography is filtered through an analysis of his work.