SOURCE: Reiter, Andrea. Review of Unheimliche Heimat, by W. G. Sebald. Modern Language Review 88, no. 3 (July 1993): 803-05.

In the following excerpt, Reiter commends Sebald's sociological perspective and novelistic approach in Unheimliche Heimat, but finds shortcomings in the omission of female author Ilse Aichinger and a tendency to allow his analysis to become subordinate to style.

Since Claudio Magris's controversial suggestion (1966) that the ‘Habsburg Mythos’ is the common denominator of Austrian literature, there have been several further attempts to pinpoint the Austrian quality in the writings of that country which would distinguish them clearly from German, in particular West German, literature. One of the more important of these was Ulrich Greiner's Der Tod des Nachsommers (Munich: Hanser, 1979), which detected the Austrian character in the ‘Wirklichkeitsverweigerung und Handlungsverzicht’; these qualities are rooted in the absence of political engagement, which dates back as far as the end of the Josephine era...