W. G. Sebald was a German writer who died at the beginning of the century in Norfolk (United Kingdom), in a traffic accident at the age of 57, after suffering a heart attack.
He stood out for altering reality without being noticed, that is to say, for constructing fictions and with them achieving what is called the “reality effect.” Sebald used photographs to illustrate his texts. In one of his books, entitled The Emigrants , the writer used his own memories to reconstruct four biographies, four lives of people who one day had to emigrate and leave their roots in search of other branches.
One of the chapters is dedicated to a great-uncle of the writer, a peculiar man who spent his life working in luxury hotels and ended up as a butler and man of company to the son of a wealthy banker. At one point in the narrative, Sebald tells us that his great-uncle told stories so far-fetched that he seemed to suffer from Korsakoff’s syndrome. And it is here that the narrative begins to take on a scientific orientation, since Korsakoff’s syndrome is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder related to a severe deficiency of vitamin B1 or thiamine, which in most cases is associated with alcohol consumption.
The main symptom of this syndrome is a marked loss of memory; amnesia in its two basic types, i.e., anterograde amnesia, or the inability to form new memories, and retrograde amnesia — the inability to remember events that occurred before the onset of the disorder , although childhoo.