SOURCE: Parks, Tim. “The Hunter.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 10 (15 June 2000): 52-3, 56.

In the following review, Parks offers a positive evaluation of Vertigo and discusses Sebald's attention to coincidences and repetitions.

In the closing pages of Cervantes's masterpiece, at last disabused and disillusioned, a decrepit Don Quixote finds that there is nothing for him beyond folly but death. When giants are only windmills and Dulcinea a stout peasant lass who has no time for a knight errant, life, alas, is unlivable. “Truly he is dying,” says the priest who takes his confession, “and truly he is sane.” Sancho Panza breaks down in tears: “Oh don't die, dear master! … Take my advice and live many years. For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy.”

Centuries...