SOURCE: Butler, Michael. “The Human Cost of Exile.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4983 (2 October 1998): 10.

In the following review, Butler offers a positive assessment of Logis in einem Landhaus.

W. G. Sebald is a distinguished scholar (he holds a Chair of German in the University of East Anglia) and a novelist with a growing international reputation. His latest book brings both sides of his personality together. For though at one level Logis in einem Landhaus is a collection of essays on Swiss or Alemannic writers, at another it is an exploration of spiritual affinities that indicate some of the sources of his own inspiration as a creator of fiction.

These are occasional pieces, modestly entitled “a memoir” or “notes”, but they have a unifying theme in that the writers Sebald discusses—Johann Peter Hebel, Gottfried Keller, Eduard Mörike, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Walser—are, to varying degrees, eccentric figures, men...