SOURCE: Krauss, Nicole. “Arabesques of Journeys.” Partisan Review 68, no. 4 (fall 2001): 646-50.

In the following review, Krauss praises Sebald's distinctive, though elusive, authorial presence and storytelling in Vertigo.

Who is W. G. Sebald? Who is the enigmatic German writer who first appeared in English in 1996 with the publication of his elegiac quartet, The Emigrants, who reappeared in 1998 with The Rings of Saturn, and who now visits us once more with Vertigo (his first novel, which, in German, preceded the other two)? Scattered throughout all three books are grainy photographs, and occasionally we glimpse Sebald peering out from behind his weeping-willow mustache. But these snapshots have the odd effect of making him seem not more familiar but more otherworldly, as elusive as the eccentric figures from history who haunt his pages. Sebald guides us through time across Europe. But he is always moving, always just ahead of us, already speaking...