The premise of The Sea is that, after the death of his wife, a man is grieving, trying to go on but struggling, not only with the loss,...

This week, a new novel: John Banville’s The Sea, published in 2005 and the winner of that year’s Man Booker Prize. It begins: “They...

One of the ways Olive K. is novel-like is the development throughout the book of the main character, Olive Kitteridge. The first chapter,...

Is Olive K. a dis-continuous narrative in the manner of such modernist works as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? So says the Wikipedia...

‘Kay. A long post today, so let’s begin. No interruptions, please, we can take questions at the end. Last week, we considered the concept...

The fifth story in Olive, “Starving” begins: “At the marina on Saturday morning, Harmon had to work not to stare at the young couple.”...

First, a personal note. For the first time in some sixty weeks, my blog did not have a new entry last Thursday. Readers were, I know,...

This week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008. Ms. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for...

I have said that, in Emigrants, Max Sebald relied for content on the stories of real people, including an unnamed narrator who was...

The last section in Emigrants is entitled Max Ferber. Here, our narrator is a youth in his early twenties who escapes life in Germany...

The third section of Emigrants, Ambros Adelwarth, is all about revenants, people who return, people who are thought of as dead but come...

Last week, I wrote about how Emigrants can be seen as the story of a narrator’s reactions to encounters with four different people—except...

A theme I’d like to pursue in thinking about this remarkable book, is that Emigrants is (among other things) about the effect on the...

In Amazon’s system of classification, Emigrants is found under literature and biography, and the promotion says the book combines...

This week, a new story, The Emigrants by the late German author W.G. Sebald. I’m reading Michael Hulse’s 1996 translation of the 1992...

The last chapter of Remains is entitled Weymouth. It begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on a pier, or boardwalk, by the sea, waiting for the...

Although Mr. Stevens spends considerable time reflecting on the past during his journey, he is at times confronted by people from the...

Remains has an interesting structure. As I have said, the novel is broken up into a prologue and seven chapters, each one identified by a...

What is the plot in Remains? Well, what is plot? “The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the...

In a 1986 Guardian interview, (pre-Remains), Ishiguro writes that he was dissatisfied with his early novels because he judged them as...