SOURCE: Winder, Robert. “The Unfortunate Traveller.” New Statesman 132, no. 4626 (24 February 2003): 48-9.

In the following review, Winder discusses Sebald's peculiar, engaging literary style and his interest in the Allied bombardment of Germany in On the Natural History of Destruction.

A year ago last December, the German writer W G Sebald was killed in a car crash in East Anglia. He had lived in England since 1966, first in Manchester and then near Norwich, after becoming professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia. At that time, he was a writer of small but glittering renown, on the basis of four works that were winning prizes and new admirers every day. In Germany he was also a noted literary critic, and the book under review here—a critique of Germany's failure to respond in literature to the Allied bombardment that killed more than 600,000 people—created its own firestorm when...