SOURCE: Sontag, Susan. “A Mind in Mourning.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5056 (25 February 2000): 3-4.

In the following review, Sontag examines stylistic and thematic continuities in Sebald's literary works and offers a positive assessment of Vertigo.

Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.

Vertigo, the third of Sebald's books to be translated into English, is how he began. It appeared in German in 1990, when its author was forty-six; three years later came The Emigrants; and two years after that, The Rings of Saturn. When The Emigrants appeared in English in 1996, the acclaim bordered on awe. Here was a masterly writer, mature, autumnal even...