SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Ghost Story.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 17 (1 November 2001): 26-7.

In the following review, Annan praises the haunting blend of fact, fiction, and meditative digression by which Sebald conjures the past and its uncanny connections with the present.

On the cover photograph a little boy stands alone on a bleak heath. He wears the white satin costume of an eighteenth-century page and in his hand he holds a white satin tricorne with an ostrich feather. His pale blond hair blows in the wind. He is not an attractive child, and his expression is puzzled, anxious, defensive—or so it seems to me. Sebald calls it “piercing, inquiring.” The photograph is printed in moody sepia, like the others in this and Sebald's previous books. Like them. Austerlitz hovers enigmatically on the border between fact and fiction. He has created a new genre, a mysterious defensive hedge...