SOURCE: Lewis, Tess. “W. G. Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20, no. 4 (December 2001): 85-90.

In the following essay, Lewis provides an overview of Sebald's literary works, thematic preoccupations, and prose style upon the publication of Austerlitz, concluding that Sebald's overriding concern is the irretrievability of the past.

How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.

—W. G. Sebald, Vertigo

Travel, Kierkegaard claimed, is the best way to avoid despair. But for the German writer W. G. Sebald, it leads, as often as not, from one state of despair to another. In his first novel, Vertigo (1990), translated two years ago, Sebald's lightly fictionalized alter ego explains that “In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a country which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would...