SOURCE: Davis, Barbara Beckerman. Review of After Nature, by W. G. Sebald. Antioch Review 62, no. 1 (winter 2004): 171.

In the following review, Davis offers a positive assessment of After Nature.

After Nature, Sebald's first work, published after his death (but with his imprimateur), is a blueprint of the themes that inform his oeuvre: grief and melancholia; a fascination with the natural world; memory. Invoking Dante as his spiritual guide, Sebald has chosen a representative personage around whom to unravel each cluster of concerns. Mattaeus Grünewald (ca. 1475/80-1528), whose religious paintings illustrate a sensibility to suffering that ultimately enfolds him; Georg Wilhem Stellar, the German naturalist, who, in 1741, accompanied Vitus Bering on his second expedition to Alaskan waters; Sebald himself, whose meditation on his family and early life in Germany illuminates his preoccupation with memory and with the tragic legacy of the modern world. Like the two seekers in whose...