Review by Nell Pach

No one’s ever really gone on the Internet. “With all this technology, absence has become a lie,” writes Hisham Bustani in The Perception of Meaning. Absent presence—that paradox of electronic communication—slowly emerges as a central motif in this enigmatic and yet wonderfully immersive novel...

Review by Nell Pach

Writers suffer, and they suffer alone, at least in the popular imagination, and quite frequently in their own imaginations as well. Moreover, they proverbially cannot abide each other’s company. “Few things are as immutable as the vindictiveness with which writers talk about their literary colleagues behind their backs,” writes W. G. Sebald in A Place in the Country, his latest posthumous publication, where he seems to accept, more or less without irony, the truth of writer-pain. A profound, ambivalent mood of separation emerges as a constant in Sebald’s analyses of the lives and creative works of his six subjects. They suffer geographic exile, they are ignored or reviled at home; not always of sound mind and body, they undergo a kind of alienation from themselves. Frequently, they walk—away, alone . . .