conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled A Place in the Country about with the genre: History, Europe.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: ..".a wry, funny account of her life-long country-house fever. This addition to the dream-home genre is a breath of fresh air."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: ". This addition to the dream-home genre is a breath of fresh air.a wry, funny account of her life-long country-house fever."..
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled A Place in the Country about German, Kafkaesque, Though with the genre: Literature & Fiction, World Literature.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Few writers have traveled as quickly from obscurity to the sort of renown that yields an adjective as quickly as German writer W. G. the author (19442001), and now the authorian is as evocative as Kafkaesque. the author is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously refract and magnify meaning. This posthumous collection, a boon to the author admirers, is a series of tributes to writers and artists the author admired and felt affinity with. Though these pieces resemble literary criticism, they are a species of homage: reverential but without hyperbole. Except for Rousseau, few of the authors subjects are well known, but readers will feel enlightened and will newly appreciate the depths of respect writers have for their peers, even if those peers lived two centuries ago. All of the authors subjects had uneasy relations with their times and with themselves: Exile, as Gottfried Keller describes it, is a form of purgatory located just outside the world. One does not have to leave home to feel bereft, and the author was the great contemporary master of this liminal territory. --Michael Autrey
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Place in the Country
  Although the essays in this volume stand as individual pieces in their own right, they are nevertheless linked by "a web of interlocking signs," motifs and images which recur from one essay to the next, linking, say, Hebel with Rousseau, Walser with Mörike, Keller with Tripp, whether via the obsessive attention to detail of the writer's (and artist's) craft, the predilection for small things and worlds in miniature, the unexpected mentions of Kleist and Hölderlin, or a boating trip across the water. This last, in particular, recurs in one form or another in almost all the essays, symbolic perhaps of the quest for a rural retreat set apart from both the modern world and "the hubbub of literary business"—even though such a retreat can only ever provide at best a temporary respite from the "eternal business of cogitation" to which all writers, Sebald seems to suggest, are inexorably prone. This notwithstanding, in an interview with Arthur Lubow in 2001, Sebald describes his own visit to the Île Saint-Pierre—a visit which apparently inspired the essay on Rousseau—in the most idyllic, even nostalgic, of terms:
  I felt at home, strangely, because it is a miniature world.... One manor house, one farmhouse. A vineyard, a field of potatoes, a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard. It has one of everything, so it is in a sense an ark. It is like when you draw a place when you are a child. I don't like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps. I think it's an aberration. This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me a moral and aesthetic ideal.
  This artistic (and by implication moral) credo echoes throughout these essays, a rejection of the relentless "general expansionism" that so characterizes the onset of the modern age. However, as readers of Sebald's fiction will know, he is always keenly aware of the vertiginous depths lurking "beneath the surface illusionism," as he writes in the essay on Jan Peter Tripp. Of his fiction he remarks in the interview with Piet de Moor in 1992, pointing out the way that the "beatific moments" serve to reveal the "full measure of the horror," that
  It is this awareness of the "inherent contradiction between this nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress towards the brink of the abyss," of the storm clouds always gathering on the historical and mental horizon, which renders so poignant and so precarious the perverse perseverance, the "awful tenacity" as Sebald says in the Foreword, of those who devote their lives to literature, "the hapless writers trapped in their web of words," who, in spite of everything, nevertheless "sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide."
  In its closing passage, Hebel's poem on the transience of the glories of the world becomes wholly identified with the vision of the Book of Revelations. In it we hear of a city hidden among the stars, which the boy, if he is good, may eventually enter:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'The mistake we always make as listeners is to imagine that these miracles of composition, language, and music are drawing directly upon their natural heritage, whereas in fact they are the most artificial thing about it'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The mistake we always make as listeners is to imagine that these miracles of composition, language, and music are drawing directly upon their natural heritage, whereas in fact they are the most artificial thing about it. What it takes to produce these effects remains, now as then, an undisclosed mystery. Certainly a rare adeptness at their craft, permitting the most minute adjustments and nuances; and then, or so I imagine, a very long memory and, possibly, a certain unluckiness in love, which appears to have been precisely the lot of those who, like Mörike and Schubert, Keller and Walser, have bequeathed to us some few of the most beautiful lines ever written.
  Keller's love stories, though, do not always end so happily (or so hopelessly) as that of the Polish tailor who, after his fortunate rescue, still has a long and by no means enchanted career ahead of him. Indeed, the two "village children" Sali and Vrenchen, lacking the slightest means of support, really do forfeit their lives. The barge laden with hay on which, after their journey on foot through the homeland in which they are now strangers, they finally consummate their love, toward the end of the story swings out into the current and floats, slowly turning, downriver toward the valley. "Sometimes the river glided through tall dark forests that laid their shade upon it; sometimes it flowed past open fields; now silent villages slid by it, and now a lonely hut; here it widened into an expanse like the bosom of a lake, and the boat almost ceased to move; there the current rushed around great rocks and sped on swiftly by the sleeping shores. In the first flush of dawn a town with many towers rose up out of the silvery waters, while low down in the sky a red-gold moon laid its path upon the river. Down this path the boat drifted slowly sideways, and as it neared the wharves of the town, in the frosty autumn mist two figures, closely clasped, slipped over the side of the dark hulk and were swept beneath the bitter current." Glide, flow, rush, pause, rise up, clasp, slip—these are the verbs by means of which, in this passage, a metaphor is gradually crafted for the physical act of love being consummated with every twist and turn of the boat and of the sentences, a love which Keller, who on paper at least can determine their fate, bequeaths to the youngsters from the village as their rightful due, even though—so far as anyone can tell—he never experienced such fulfillment himself. From the very beginning, despite a deep need of and evidently inexhaustible capacity for love, Keller's life was marked by rejection and disappointment. The ladies whose hand he sought were not easily able to overlook his short stature, not Fräulein Rieter, nor the beautiful woman from the Rhineland whom he so admired as she rode along the Berlin boulevards, nor the Heidelberg actress Johanna Kapp. And Luise Scheidegger, the only one who was prepared to share her life with Keller, a few weeks after their engagement drowned herself in a fountain in Herzogenbuchsee. In his darker moments, Keller may well have seen this as proof that he was not wrong to be ashamed of his ill-proportioned body, so to speak not fully developed from the waist down, and that he was destined to bring despair upon those to whom he declared his love. The actress from Heidelberg, too, ended her days in mental darkness. In the Zurich Central Library there is a small watercolor by Keller of an idealized landscape with trees, which—via the painter Bernhard Fries, a member of the Feuerbach circle—came into the possession of Johanna Kapp, who during her illness cut away, in a minute and detailed operation, approximately a quarter of the lower part of the picture. What moved her to this drastic incision we do not know, nor what Keller's feelings were when, after its return to him following Johanna's death, he held the thus disfigured picture in his hands once more. But perhaps he may have sensed that the snow-white space which opens up behind the almost transparent landscape is even more beautiful than the colored miracle of art.
  At any rate, the antithesis to this glimpse into a beyond consisting of pure nothingness, revealed by the unfortunate Johanna's scissorwork, is the colossal scrawl which Heinrich Lee one day, in a melancholy moment, begins to execute on a large piece of cardboard, and which he continues each day with countless strokes of the pen until a vast gray cobweb covers almost the entire surface. "If you observed," writes Heinrich, "the tangle more closely, you could discover therein the most commendable coherence and application, as it formed a labyrinth which could be followed up from the starting point to the end, in a continuous progression of strokes and windings which perhaps amounted to thousands of yards. At times a new style manifested itself, to a certain degree a new epoch of the work; new designs and motifs, often delicate and graceful, appeared, and if the amount of attention, sense of the appropriate, and perseverance that was required for this absurd mosaic had been applied to a real task, I certainly should have produced something worth looking at. Here and there only, hesitations, smaller or greater, appeared, certain twists in the labyrinths of my distracted soul, and the careful manner in which the pen had sought to extricate itself from the dilemma proved how my dreaming consciousness was caught in the web. So it went on for days and weeks, and the sole variation, when I was at home, would be that, with my forehead leaning against the window, I would watch the progress of the clouds, observe their shape, and in the meantime let my thoughts rove afar into the distance." This description of the distinctly melancholic scrawl is reminiscent of the blue sheets of paper that Keller used as blotters as he toiled over
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Where Sebald quotes directly from other writers in the text, the relevant passages are quoted, wherever possible and appropriate, from the published English translations listed below. In some cases, however, these have been adapted where necessary to fit more closely with Sebald's original. It should, though, also be noted that Sebald often does not quote directly but adapts citations for his own ends.
  Just as it was a privilege and a pleasure to share the teaching of German literature at UEA with Max Sebald at the time he was writing these essays, so, too, it has been an honor and a pleasure to translate them into English. I am very grateful to the Estate of W. G. Sebald and the Wylie Agency, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium Straelen, and the DAAD for their generous assistance and support.
  Among the many individuals who have so generously shared their advice and insights, particular thanks are due to Gertrud Aebischer-Sebald, Anthea Bell, Susan Bernofsky, Patrick Charbonneau, Iain Galbraith, Heide Gerland, Russell Goulbourne, Mark Handsley, Ria van Hengel, Richard Hibbitt, Luke Ingram, Anna Kelly, Scott Moyers, Ray Ockenden, Brigid Purcell, Gene Rogers, Clive Scott, Ada Vigliani, and the late Anthony Vivis, for all their assistance, comments, and suggestions.