As Theodor W. Adorno once said of Franz Kafka, so we may say of W. G. Sebald: what baffles and eludes us in his work may one day provide the key to the whole.1 Sebald’s rise to international acclaim was meteoric, the critical consensus of his accomplishment swift; yet, despite this and despite the proliferation of a vast secondary literature—the “Sebald industrial complex,” as one critic quipped2—much of his writing retains an intriguing and incommensurable aspect. To state this is not to petition for scholarly attention to neglected works or hitherto underinvestigated aspects of his Nachlass; even a book like Austerlitz (2001), arguably the most celebrated and remarked on of Sebald’s “prose fiction,” still contains much to confound us.3
On the face of it, though, Austerlitz is the most legible of Sebald’s writings and provides the most sustained confrontation with his driving concerns. Inevitably what...
