[In the following review, Schwartz offers praise for Logis in einem Landhaus.]

In a handsomely designed, tastefully printed, and creatively illustrated volume, six men who have enriched European culture are discussed with expertise and charm. W. G. Sebald has selected the early-twentieth-century Swiss author Robert Walser, the nineteenth-century Swiss novelist and poet Gottfried Keller, the nineteenth-century German poet Eduard Mörike, the early-nineteenth-century Swiss chronicler and poet Johann Peter Hebel, the eighteenth-century Swiss-French poetic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the early-twentieth-century Swiss painter Jan Peter Tripp to tell us things about each which we could hardly find in textbooks on literature or art. Not since Rejection and Emancipation was published in 1991 have I acquired such unique insights into the world of Swiss literati. Bibliophiles will be inspired to reread the works of Keller, the romantic essays of Rousseau, the lonely and melancholy prose of Walser (whom Sebald calls “le promeneur solitaire”), and the amazingly beautiful poetry of Mörike. The emphasis here is on reread, for familiarization with the works of these chosen six figures prior to reading Logis is important, lest one wind up in a literary cul-de-sac.

Sebald's little tome is such a treasure because of the singular way he has of commenting on the subtlest aspects of the lives and cultural contributions of the six geniuses he discusses. He tells us things about the foibles and fears, tears and visions, sufferings and longings of these half-dozen men which sharpen our knowledge and at the same time enhance our appreciation of their work. Examples may include Rousseau's little-known interest in botany, Keller's obsession with harnessing his overbubbling feelings about the mystery of the female Eros, Mörike's unfulfilled love life as expressed in his verse, Tripp's “frightening depth” (to use Sebald's term) which he transmitted in the painting of flowers, and the like. Sebald's commentary on the art and letters of these delicate souls should be missed neither by students of esthetics nor by historians of high culture, for he tells how these six artists of brush or pen were baptized by the zeitgeist of their respective eras in history. Two examples: Hebel's wonderful observations and wisdom stories in his almanac, suggesting historical changes and personages straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and Rousseau's romantic essays and worship of nature and instinct in the midst of rationalism and philosophes, which the author attempts to revive in his own mind as he muses in Rousseau's study on the island of St. Peter—a wonderful passage. Sebald has a knack for ferreting out unknown secrets in each of these individuals without ever succumbing to the temptation of being anecdotal or psychoanalytic. Neither does he ever stress the droll or eccentric at the expense of the main thrust: literature, art, and philosophy. Thus we appreciate anew the joyful realism of Mörike's poetry, for example, while at the same time tracing the spoor of his animus in writing his beautiful verse.

If there is any fault in Logis in einem Landhaus, I have not found it. And as one critic has said about Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the inexpungeable merits will dwarf all fault-finding.