SOURCE: Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” New Republic 227, no. 13 (23 September 2002): 32-9.

In the following review, Franklin discusses Sebald's authorial persona and tensions between fact and fiction in his writings, his portrayal of historical suffering and persecution in After Nature, and his controversial statements about the Allied bombing of Germany in Luftkrieg und Literatur.

If there is an underworld where the darkest nightmares of the twentieth century dwell, W. G. Sebald could be its Charon. Starting with Vertigo, which combines sketches of Kafka and Stendhal with a fictionalized record of travels in Italy and elsewhere, and ending with Austerlitz, the story of a boy sent to England via Kindertransport in 1939 and brought up under a false name, all of Sebald's books have been about bridging gaps, and about the impossibility of bridging gaps—between memory and forgetting, between art and reality, between the living and the dead. These extraordinary...