SOURCE: Coe, Jonathan. “Tact.” London Review of Books (20 March 1997): 24-5.

In the following review, Coe praises the tactfulness with which Sebald conveys the suffering, dislocation, and painful legacy of the Holocaust in The Emigrants.

This curious, mesmerising book, a hybrid of fiction and memoir which tells the life stories of four unhappy exiles, is the work of a German writer until now almost unknown in this country. It has already scooped up prizes in continental Europe and been published to great acclaim both in Britain and America. The epithets which have been flung at it include sober, delicate, beautiful, moving, powerful, mysterious, civilised and a hundred others: but it would be hard to praise The Emigrants more highly than by saying that it is a supremely tactful book.

Why isn't tact invoked more often, I wonder, in the hierarchy of literary virtues? It can appear in so many...