Sebald's imaginative masterwork is a philosophical, personal odyssey rooted in history and the randomness of life and memory. Most of all, it is an elegiac study of mortality and the nature of loss. A formidable cast of characters populate his eclectic and profound musings - Thomas Browne, the poet Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald a reluctant aristocrat and translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement. There are others less well-known but no less unique. Death and the collapse of epochs are his themes. For him we are all part of all histories. Yet for all the morbidity, this German academic, who has spent more than 30 years in England as a university lecturer, possesses engagingly black humour and a rich store of red herrings. For him, ruined houses are powerful testaments of the dead. Among the still living is an Anglo-Irish family he recalls meeting who appeared to be virtually camping out in their suitably decaying ancestral heap.
Sebald's elegant, eccentric and deliberately ambivalent collage of history, observation and mood pieces was born of a journey undertaken on foot through coastal East Anglia and a subsequent illness. Imagine the music of Britten as the soundtrack for this, one of the most original, genuinely intellectual prose achievements of the century. Sebald, a rare thinker, has created an 18th century novel of ideas utterly pertinent to our chaotic world. Magnificent.
