[In the following review, Landon offers a positive assessment of Vertigo.]

The appearance in English of Sebald's first novel will be warmly greeted by those who know the two later books already translated from the German by Michael Hulse: The Rings of Saturn (1995) and The Emigrants (1997). You need a list to suggest the scope, originality, and richness of Sebald's prose. Scrapbook, essay collection, personal diary, historical fiction, novel of ideas—whatever you want to call it, Vertigo diverts and surprises at every turn, and bears the unmistakable stamp of maturity and erudition.

Sebald is a deeply personal writer who views the European experience from a wide-angle perspective, reaffirming humanism through curiosity and tact. There is no complacency or cynicism in any of his books, whose quiet decency renders garish the overbearing and rapacious spirit of our culture of entertainment and globalization. To be sure, Sebald himself is both entertaining and cosmopolitan, but his art is nourished by humility and learning. He shares the detached sensibility of Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, and Beckett, and like them, has forged his own form.

The exquisite Rings of Saturn, which catapulted Sebald to the forefront of European writers, explored and interconnected an amazing range of concerns, strolling gracefully through the maze of history, and holding individual vulnerability in view against the annihilating vistas of time and space. Similarly, the eclectic personages that Sebald encounters on his travels in Vertigo share the narrator's fearful alertness to the mystery of existence—a timeless and unfashionable stance that Western tradition associates with the sublime. The translation, by a prominent British poet, is brilliantly crafted.