World literature has been cruelly and abruptly robbed of a truly great voice. The death of the German writer W.G. Sebald at 57 in a car accident near his Norfolk home on Friday is a literary as well as human tragedy.
Since the publication of English translations of his obsessive, elegiac masterpieces began with The Emigrants in 1996, three years after its German publication, followed by The Rings of Saturn (Frankfurt 1995; London 1998) Vertigo (Frankfurt 1990; London 1999) and in October his finest achievement, Austerlitz - a search for lost identity, published almost simultaneously in German and English - readers and critics have wondered at the art, profundity and extraordinary genius guiding his beautiful photomontage-like testaments.
He was a quest artist searching for truth and embarked through his books on philosophical, highly intellectual, yet beautifully humane odysseys that travel through memory but also actual landscapes and cities.
Each examination, whether of a view, an ancient building, a railway station or a face becomes a melancholic, often laconic meditation. All existence is filtered through the past and a subtle sense of loss. He explores history with an artist's eye and a investigator's meticulousness, all the while tracing the connections and coincidences of which a human life is made. Even at its apparently most random, such as in The Rings of Saturn, structured on a journey undertaken on foot by the narrator through coastal East Anglia, Sebald's consummate, seamless technique, love of anecdote, detail and fluid order sustains his narratives; a chance fact becomes a story, a story the portrait of a life. In The Emigrants four apparently independent stories of lives lived in the shadow of war combine to recreate forgotten worlds of exiled ghosts. In Vertigo, a murder hunt undercuts the young Stendhal witnessing Napoleon's Italian campaign, while Sebald revisits his own childhood. As professor of European Literature since 1987 at the University of East Anglia where he taught for 30 years, Sebald worked by the beliefs that shaped his art.
He maintained a European overview while never forgetting he was a Catholic from a Bavarian village. This consolidated his sense of being from the margins, at a distance from the rest of Germany and, in time, Germany itself.
I last saw Sebald in 1999 adjusting his familiar rucksack as he set off "to explore Belfast".
My little daughter was with me and enjoyed his ironic charm so much, she asked him to visit.
At the news of his death, she cried; so will we all.
