W.G. Sebald, career academic, obsessive thinker and elegist, looks at the world with a self-contained expression of thoughtful curiosity. Admittedly there is also a strong element of irony in his glance, even impatience. But he is kindly and wise, darkly humorous, sympathetic and quick to joke about his indestructible and persistent "Alpine accent" - despite his long residence in Britain.
Above all, he is an original, a quest writer embarking on philosophical and highly intellectual, yet humane, journeys which move through actual land and city scapes, examining trees and ancient buildings with equal measures of melancholic attention. He views life through the past, exploring history with an artist's eye, tracing the connections and coincidences which make up a human life.
His delivery is deliberately low-key and understated, all the better to display his comic timing. The publication of Die Ausgewanderten in Germany in 1993 moved reviewers to agree their country's history had finally been addressed with a profundity which was heartbreaking, honest and extremely valuable.
Within three years, that book was published as The Emigrants in an English translation, and immediately Sebald was hailed as a rare voice. It emerged as one of the books of 1996. His genius lies in being able to evoke the power and pain behind the calmest, most elegant of word pictures. In The Emigrants, four apparently independent stories of lives lived in the shadow of war and loss combine to recreate forgotten worlds of exiles and ghosts. Sebald's narrator listens and recreates individuals' stories, along the way meeting up with a collection of lost souls.
At one point the narrator recalls an inspiring teacher he had as a boy and later in middle age learns of his grim suicide. Throughout the book he calls upon his various ghosts who act as witnesses appearing in random photographs, chance moments as if culled from a vast album. Randomness is a quality he strives for, brilliantly balancing it against precise observations.
As powerful and graceful as it is, and for all its haunting eloquence, The Emigrants does not quite prepare the reader for the mysterious wonders of Sebald's metaphysical quest, The Rings of Saturn, which was published last year in English, three years after the German publication of Die Ringe des Saturn, which again emerged as a book of the year - more like Book of the Decade.
Death and the collapse of epochs are his themes and loss preoccupies him, yet his writing is invariably uplifting. The Rings of Saturn not only consolidates the reputation Sebald won with The Emigrants, but has established him as an international writer. While he must have noticed this, W.G. "call me Max" Sebald is too sane and self-possessed to appear particularly overwhelmed by the fuss.
Schwindel. Gefuhle., written in four parts like The Emigrants, was published in German in 1990. The English translation appears next month under the title Vertigo. Part thriller, criss-crossing the trail of two murders, it also contains his most autobiographical writing to date.
In Germany he has already been widely published as an essayist and critic, having written on German writers such as Gottfried Keller, Peter Hebel and the great Robert Walser. By way of deflecting the attention English readers are now giving to him, Sebald remarks with mock weariness: "I began writing to get away from ordinary life; now I'll have to take up something different." One of the first things Sebald says in his deep, formal, slow-moving voice is "never before this year have I been asked anything about Goethe. Now this year . . . You're not going to ask me about him, are you?" As a Bavarian, Sebald, who was born in Wertach im Allgau, has always felt at a distance from the rest of Germany. This sense of being on the margins has served him well in his writings. He has chosen to make himself an observer, never a central character, even when writing at his most autobiographical. He left home first as a student determined to study German literature in a place where everyone wasn't doing the same, so he went to French-speaking Switzerland.
From there he moved to England in 1966, arriving first in Manchester, before moving to Norwich where he has taught mainly German literature at the University of East Anglia since 1970. Since 1987 he has been professor of European Literature and was also the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. It is a practical issue which concerns him greatly as a teacher, as well as a writer whose work is subjected to the translation process.
Ask him how he feels about translation and he gives a characteristic shudder. While he speaks about the shortcomings of moving from one language to another, his approach is unusually meticulous. Sebald hands his work to a translator who then returns it to him. He works on it, then passes it on to a friend who reads it. The text is then returned to him before being passed on to an editor. After all this, when he looks at the English translation of his text does he feel, "yes, this is the book I wrote"? "No" is the simple answer. If there is anyone out there in need of a good reason to learn German, here it is.
Much of the enjoyment of teaching has finally died for him, as he describes with a shrug of resigned disbelief how students have become less interested in learning. "They are also less educated. Now they leave college at 21 as professional consumers who are barely literate." In a way he also feels less happy about writing, which he says becomes more difficult with each book, not easier. Living in England has not made him feel more English, nor has it left him feeling less German: "I am what I am."
SEBALD'S love of details sustains him through his apparently random odysseys: a chance fact becomes a story; a story becomes the portrait of a life. The Rings of Saturn is the story of a journey undertaken on foot through coastal East Anglia. The narrative begins with the whereabouts of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, mentioning en route that Browne was the son of a London silk merchant. Just short of 300 pages later, it closes, again recalling Browne's father, the silk merchant. During the travels described within these two points is an extraordinary variety of fact and fancy, the real and invented. Sebald's specialises in paper chases of a most sophisticated nature. Kafka, the poet Swinburne who suffered from nerves and also boasted an unusually large hat size, Conrad, Edward Fitzgerald, reluctant aristocrat and translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and Roger Casement all have walk-on parts.
Of his country's history, Sebald says: "I am oppressed by it. It is a terrible burden." Yet he does not deny that Germany began better than most nations. "Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart . . . The culture is not innocent", and he agrees that the story of 20th-century Europe is largely Germany's. Sebald does not celebrate German culture: "I only have to see 30 seconds of footage from the war. You can't stop thinking."
His German is formal, even old-fashioned, almost regional, yet "not quite traditional" and he says he owes it to his grandfather. "My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army." The third child and only son in a family of four, Sebald was born in 1944 and raised as a Catholic. His mother still lives in the village where he was born. Living in flat, watery Norfolk, does he miss his native Alps? "Yes but I always felt the mountains could be oppressive as well. I miss the running water, the streams. In Norfolk the water is still, stagnant. Then in summer, it dries up."
Sebald succeeds in making us look at the ordinary, while also confirming the importance of memory at its most random. Each re-reading reveals further riches. He sets out to make us think - and does - how many writers can achieve this?
The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn are published by Harvill. Vertigo will be published by Harvill on December 9th
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist