Scott Esposito on Sergio Chejfec

In the November / December issue of The Critical Flame—which has indeed finally appeared—Quarterly Conversation editor and critic Scott Esposito looks at Sergio Chejfec through the lens of Sebald. He discovers striking similarities, or affinities, between the two:

Curiosity for the mundane, of course, is a common enough quality in a writer. What distinguishes Sebald and Chejfec is how thoroughly they wed mundanities with defamiliarization, and its handmaiden, the uncanny. Sebald repeatedly demonstrates that the camera is an ideal tool for this: representations of everyday life that are at once realistic and unrealistic. Able to pause what we normally see in motion, photographs peel back motion's invisible mask, showing us familiar things in unfamiliar ways. "I always have the feeling with photographs," Sebald wrote, "that they exert a pull on the viewer and in this entirely enormous manner draw him out, so to speak, from the real world into an unreal world." Chejfec likewise shows things that are only glimpsed on the margins of experience, when the mind has wandered far from the motion of normal human life. It is this speed that he at one point terms "the lethargic scale of banal discoveries." Chejfec's perspective is like our view when, looking at The Ambassadors, our eyes slip to the skull at the bottom of the painting.

 I highly recommend you check it out, along with the rest of the new issue.