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| | W. G. Sebald's new book. By Ruth Franklin |
 | | Sebald often wrote about literary figures as if they were "characters" in his books—one section of Vertigo imagines what Kafka might have experienced during a fateful visit to a sanatorium—and these items, each just a few pages long, offer criticism in a similarly imaginative vein. |
| | From an anecdote of a disease-ridden village to a contemplation of the mackerel, each piece in this book closely adheres to Sebald's fundamental obsession: how to live under the shadows cast by the cataclysmic events of World War II, European imperialism, environmental destruction—"the marks of pain," as he put it in Austerlitz, "which... |
| | Sebald as reader, like Sebald as writer, homes in utterly unselfconsciously on the aspects of these writers that interest him most, often to the total disregard of anything else about their work. |
| www.slate.com /id/2114773 (927 words) |
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