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Title: Sebald, the Last Great Writer of the Twentieth Century
Review: In his third work of prose fiction (the word 'novel' seems somehow too banal for what Sebald writes), the German-born writer long resident in England takes a solitary walking trip along the English coast from Norwich to Harwich. Upon this 'travel narrative' framework, Sebald embroiders a wide-ranging meditation on human cruelty and genocide and its possible connections to the amoral 'cruelty' of nature. As Sebald walks along this lonely, decaying stretch of North Sea coast, images suggestive of the Shoah and other 20th century atrocities seem to appear everywhere, until ultimately the book becomes a portrait of a mind haunted by the Holocaust--and by the possibility that cruelty seems to be everywhere because it really IS everywhere... This is a staggering achievement.
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