SOURCE: Tindall, Gillian. “The Fortress of the Heart.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5142 (19 October 2001): 21.

In the following review, Tindall judges Sebald's fictionalization of past lives and identities in Austerlitz as convincing.

It is a strange country, W. G. Sebald's, though one that has become familiar through his four books now published in English. Its hidden heart seems to be in Germany, but often a Germany of night-time railway stations that are there as doorways to other destinations, other versions of existence, in Belgium, Italy, or further east. It has a significant territory in the windswept fields and secret country houses of East Anglia (where Sebald is Professor of European Literature), but from there the waves wash the shores of Holland and so back into the Continental flux. The European routes criss-cross between the present, moments of Sebald's own past, the more remote pasts of those now moving out of...