Stories without a safety net

Since the publication last year of the English translation of Sebald's graceful elegy The Rings of Saturn, a growing international readership has become aware of this remarkable writer: his reputation outside Germany had already been established in 1986 with The Emigrants.

Sebald defies classification; his narratives are magical investigative odysseys through history, memoir, landscape, war, the limitations of life and the relentlessness of death.

As a narrator he proves a calm, reflective observer in possession of a well developed, black sense of humour. There is a strong autobiographical element and yet Sebald - the least egotistical of writers - remains offstage. Vertigo, the third of his philosophical travelogues to be published in English, is in fact his first work in this genre, and was originally published in 1990 as Schwindel, Gefuhle. Not only is the arrival of a new Sebald book exciting, but it also provides a chance to witness the development of an extraordinary narrative technique as apparently random as it is deliberate. Sebald pursues stories within stories, making connections and interconnections, following clues while also playfully tossing in more than a few red herrings. Central to his vision is the power and, more importantly, the vulnerability of memory.

It is worth pointing out that Vertigo is as assured and as visual as its successors, if possibly less haunting and not quite as seamless. In the first of four movements a young Frenchman, pleased at 17 to have finally shaken off his childhood, if only because he is now a soldier facing battle, falls in love with a soprano singing a romantic role, despite her left eye, swivelling with effort, and her missing upper right canine. It is 1800 and the youth - who is intent on discovering love, or at least, sex - is serving in Napoleon's army. As the years pass his tally of failed love affairs increases. Determined to become "the greatest writer of all time" he in time comes some way towards this goal. The young man is Marie Henri Beyle who will become famous as Stendhal.

In the next sequence the narrator, travelling around Italy in the 1980s and intensely aware of being an outsider, finds himself by chance crossing the path of a pair of serial killers. Classical art and grim newspaper reports are juxtaposed in a narrative dominated by its laconic tone. It is quite a personal piece in that the narrator, falling victim to the careless handling of his passport by hotel staff, must secure proof of his identity at the German consulate in Milan. The ghost of Franz Kafka emerges and becomes a companion of sorts and the second and third sections interlap. The theme of wandering with a purpose is continued as Sebald's uneasy, displaced narrator travels on in the final part, this time through southern Germany, eventually arriving in Bavaria.

Returning to his native village and the very inn where his family had had rooms during his childhood, the narrator recalls various incidents, including a serious illness.

Everything has a meaning, a purpose. Sebald's art owes part of its magic to his feel for detail; the rest is shaped by a rich imagination, his sense of history and above all, his artist's eye.

Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist