SOURCE: Kunkel, Benjamin. “The Emigrant.” Nation 274, no. 12 (1 April 2002): 42-4.

In the following review of Austerlitz, Kunkel discusses Sebald's romanticism and preoccupation with the calamities of history, concluding that Sebald's autobiographical reticence deprives his work of truth.

On December 14, the German writer W. G. Sebald died, age 57, in a car accident in England, where he had lived for thirty-five years. He had published four remarkable books: fluid, melancholy novel-essays composed in beautifully rich and formal language, and studded with odd black-and-white photos rescued from the oblivion that was his overwhelming theme. In each book, including Austerlitz, brought out just before Sebald's death in an English translation he supervised, a solitary traveler undertakes research into devastation (of trees and animal species, of human practices and populations) and conducts interviews among the bereaved, making himself into a kind of tribune of universal loss. About the traveler we know little but that...