W. G. Sebald died on the fourteenth of December, 2001, in a car accident on the A146 outside Norwich, at the age of fifty-seven. He had published four prose books and a small body of poetry. The four prose books, in the Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell translations, run to roughly 1,250 pages in the New Directions editions. They are Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz.
December of 2026 will mark twenty-five years since his death. This reviewer has spent April and May rereading the four books in the order of their German publication, an order that does not match the order of their English appearance. Schwindel. Gefühle. came first, in 1990; Die Ausgewanderten in 1992; Die Ringe des Saturn in 1995; Austerlitz in 2001, a few months before his death.
The question that prompted the rereading was specific. Sebald has, since his death, been the most imitated prose writer in English. The Sebaldian mode, the long paragraph with the small inset photograph, the digressive itinerary, the melancholy second-hand narration of someone else's life, has been adopted by writers from Teju Cole to Daniel Mendelsohn to Olivia Laing to dozens of less prominent practitioners. The question is whether the original survives the imitation.
The answer this rereading produced is yes, but not for the reasons usually given. The Sebald sentence, that famous coiling thing that defers its main verb across half a page, is not the source of the work's durability. Many of his imitators have learned to produce sentences of similar length. The durability comes from something the imitators have mostly not been able to copy: the relationship Sebald established between the text and the photograph.
The photographs in Sebald's books are usually small, badly reproduced, and undated. They appear without captions. They sit in the margin of the text or, occasionally, in the middle of a paragraph. They do not illustrate what the text says; they sit adjacent to it. The reader's eye is forced to do work the text does not do for it: to ask what this photograph is doing here, what it has to do with the sentence that precedes it and the sentence that follows.
Most of the imitators have used photographs as illustration. The Sebaldian use is closer to the use Marcel Broodthaers made of objects in his museum installations: the photograph is a found object placed in proximity to other found objects, and the meaning is in the proximity rather than in either object alone.
The Emigrants, in Michael Hulse's 1996 English, is the easiest of the four books to give to a new reader. It consists of four biographical sketches of Jewish émigrés Sebald encountered or researched: Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, Max Ferber. The sketches do not connect in any explicit way. Each is a portrait of a life shaped, often invisibly, by the catastrophe of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945.
What rereading reveals, twenty-five years on, is how much the book depends on what it does not say. The word Holocaust does not appear. The word Auschwitz appears, in passing, in the Ambros Adelwarth section, in a context that does not foreground it. The catastrophe is the gravitational field around which the four sketches orbit, and it is felt precisely because it is not named.
Most of the imitators have named. The Sebaldian melancholy, in the work of his followers, has tended to be about the writer's own losses, his or her own family history, his or her own depressive episodes. The grief in Sebald's books is almost never the narrator's. It is the grief of the people the narrator has met or read about, and the narrator is the conduit by which that grief reaches the reader.
The Rings of Saturn, in 1998, is the book that made Sebald famous in English. It is the account of a walking trip along the Suffolk coast in August of 1992. The walk is the armature on which Sebald hangs a series of digressions: on Thomas Browne's skull, on the silk industry, on the bombing of Germany, on the herring fisheries, on Edward FitzGerald's translation of Omar Khayyám.
Rereading it in 2026, this reviewer was struck by how much the book is held together by a single mood and how thin its argumentative apparatus is. There is no thesis. There is no claim. There is only the slow accumulation of material, each piece of which is connected to the next by no logic stronger than that one followed the other in the writer's mind during a particular walk. The book should not work. The book works.
It works because the mood is consistent and because the mood is one most contemporary readers recognize but cannot name. It is the mood of a person who has read a great deal of European history and who has not been able to shake the awareness that the landscape he is walking through is built on top of catastrophes the landscape has forgotten. Sebald walks across the empty beach at Dunwich and remembers the medieval city that fell into the sea. He walks past the abandoned naval base at Orford Ness and remembers the experiments conducted there.
The remembering is the work. The reader who comes to the book expecting a travelogue is given instead a sustained act of involuntary memory in which the landscape is the trigger.
Austerlitz, his last book, is the one most reviewers consider his masterpiece. This reviewer is no longer sure. Austerlitz is the most novelistic of the four books, with a single sustained narrator other than Sebald himself, a clear biographical arc, and a discovery in the third act of the Czech mother taken to Theresienstadt. It is, in the conventional novelistic sense, the most successful.
It is also the book in which the Sebaldian method begins to do something it had not done before. The photographs in Austerlitz are used more conventionally. The relationship between text and image becomes closer to illustration. The famous photograph of the small boy in the page-boy costume, which the narrator presents as a photograph of the young Jacques Austerlitz, is treated by the text as an object the text describes. The earlier books would have placed it on the page and let the reader make of it what she could.
It is impossible to know what Sebald would have done next. He died too soon. The Norwich coroner ruled that he had suffered an aneurysm at the wheel before the collision. He was driving from his home in Wymondham to his office at the University of East Anglia. The road is straight. The car crossed into the oncoming lane and struck a lorry.
What the four books leave behind, twenty-five years on, is a way of writing that the language has not yet absorbed. The imitators have not absorbed it; they have copied the surface. The reader who wants to see what the method actually is should reread the four in order over two months, with the German originals on the shelf for the occasional spot-check, and should pay attention not to the sentences but to the photographs and to what the photographs are not saying.
The New Directions paperback editions are well made, with the Mette Engelund cover designs in the slate-grey series, and they will hold up to a careful rereading. The Carcanet hardcover collected edition of 2021 is the more handsome object but is now out of print and commands a price the books are not quite worth.
Sebald wrote in German until the end. He gave lectures in English at UEA from 1970 until his death and was professionally bilingual, but he chose not to write his books in English. Whether the books are better in their German originals is a question this reviewer's German is not strong enough to answer. The Hulse translations of the first three and the Bell translation of Austerlitz are, on the evidence of comparison with the original where possible, faithful and self-effacing. They are the English the books deserved.