Ensayos

Twenty-five years after his death, this volume brings together a significant portion of W. G. Sebald's essayistic work and offers, for the first time, the Spanish translation of *Stay in a Country House*, a pivotal book within Sebald's corpus, a perfect hybrid of essay and narrative prose. Far from embracing the Germanic tradition, Sebald understood the essay and criticism as constant provocation and denunciation: he was more interested in intuitions than in method, and he found his bearings better on the shifting map of the constellation than on the seemingly firm ground of deduction. In short, he considered that in nonfiction, form is also an inseparable part of content. A distinctive feature of Sebald's literary essay is his inclination to seek biographical elements that illuminate an author's work, a tendency that reaches its finest expression in the texts of *Stay in a Country House*. In them, one perceives an ineffable tension between idyll and catastrophe, a melancholy of resistance that already appears in the essays of Putrid Homeland, dedicated to Austrian authors, and which will later surface in his narrative work. Sebald, who, as seen in On the Natural History of Destruction, had a blind faith in fiction and prose as sources of knowledge about the world, considered the writer's task to be "to put everything back in the order intended at the beginning through a minute intervention." And that was his method: to tentatively explore the realm of the essay in order to later put it into practice in narrative prose. Because only in this way is it possible to narrate all that remains to be told.