Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello, from KCRW, Santa Monica. I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm honored to have as my guest, W.G. Seibold. He is the author. I will do them in the order of composition rather than the order

of their appearance in America, of Vertigo, of the emigrants, the Rings of Saturn, and now

published by Random House, his new novel, Austerlitz. I wanted to begin by asking, the prose has the breaths and cadences of poetry,

and I wanted to ask, were you influenced by German poetry?

No, not at all by German poetry.

The influence came, if from anywhere, from 19th century German prose writing, which also

has prosodic rhythms that are very pronounced, where prose is more important than, say,

social background or plot in any

manifest sense. And this 19th century German prose writing, even at the time, was very provincial.

It never was received outside Germany to any extent worth mentioning.

But it's always been very close to me, not least, because the writers all hailed from the

periphery of the German-speaking lands where I also come from.

Among them whom?

Adelbert Stifterfter in Austria, Gottfried Keller in Switzerland.

And they are both absolutely wonderful writers who achieve a very, very high intensity in their

prose and where one can see that for them it's

...