SOURCE: Evans, Julian. “Platform.” New Statesman 132, no. 4634 (21 April 2003): 54.

In the following essay, Evans judges Sebald's writing to be unrealistic and withdrawn, citing the author's preoccupation with illness and scenes without people as evidence of his empty disengagement.

I have never understood the fanatical intensity of critical admiration for the novels of W G Sebald. A fortnight ago I reread the first of his “novels” to be published in English, The Emigrants, then the other three books—Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—because I wanted to understand why I couldn't believe most of what he wrote. In the process I discovered that what, in these four books which are among the most acclaimed of the past decade, is supposed to be rooted in “the real”—in the devastation of the Holocaust and the failure of 19th-century rationalism to prevent the darkness of the 20th—has, if you...