This review is written from a solidly Jewish-American perspective, and your experience of Sebald's work may differ. Just get a copy of Austerlitz and start reading. It won't make sense for a while. Don't get bogged down, skim if you have to. Peer at the photos, as if from a distance of fifty years. The narrator is in a kind of fog, as if the only way he can express his emotions is through some metaphor about European history. I don't know any other book like it - in film, it reminded me of Tarkovsky's Solaris.