James Wood, from 'W. G. Sebald, Humorist', New Yorker

Because we are not God, our narration of another's life is a pretense of knowledge--simultaneously an attempt to know and a confession how little we know. Most conventional fiction, with its easy inherited confidence, conceals the difficulty of this task; the concealment is what we find consoling about even quite demanding fiction. Sebald makes the unreliability of this labor a central element of his writing…