[In the following review, Butler offers a positive assessment of Logis in einem Landhaus.]

W. G. Sebald is a distinguished scholar (he holds a Chair of German in the University of East Anglia) and a novelist with a growing international reputation. His latest book brings both sides of his personality together. For though at one level Logis in einem Landhaus is a collection of essays on Swiss or Alemannic writers, at another it is an exploration of spiritual affinities that indicate some of the sources of his own inspiration as a creator of fiction.

These are occasional pieces, modestly entitled “a memoir” or “notes”, but they have a unifying theme in that the writers Sebald discusses—Johann Peter Hebel, Gottfried Keller, Eduard Mörike, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Walser—are, to varying degrees, eccentric figures, men who were either in conflict with their environment, as with the case of Rousseau, or lived their imaginative lives at a tangent to social reality. Whether they travelled or stayed in the same restricted environment, their existence—as the title of the book suggests—appears to be that of transient residents within ostensibly stable communities.

Even Hebel, who rose to high rank in the Lutheran Church, wrote his gently didactic stories from an idiosyncratic angle which attracted, for example, the admiration of that archetypal outsider, Walter Benjamin. Sebald neatly demonstrates how the Nazis (and Heidegger as late as 1956) misunderstood Hebel's prose, erroneously claiming him as a “Heimatdichter” for ideological purposes. At the same time, he does justice to Hebel's conservative paternalism, rejecting Benjamin's view that he supported the French Revolution.

The essay on Rousseau is a meditation on the French-Swiss philosophe, sparked by a visit to the idyllic Peterinsel in the Bieler See where Rousseau spent one of the very few peaceful moments of his turbulent life. Sebald's beautiful prose, juxtaposing contemporary tourism and eighteenth-century reality, skilfully conjures up the tranquillity of nature that Rousseau experienced and which today's visitors in their haste ignore.

With a similar economy of means, Sebald succeeds in delineating the Biedermeier world in which Mörike lived and worked. Behind Mörike's Swabian quietism lurked a constant premonition of disaster and chaos—the past coloured by the horrors of the French Revolution, the future already cloudy with encroaching industrialization.

Keller, too, was aware of the fragility of social existence, despite the fact that Switzerland was the only place where 1848 produced successful democratic change. He observed the waves of emigration from southern Germany and Switzerland to the United States, and knew the human cost of exile. Sebald explores with sensitivity Keller's melancholy, his proximity to an earlier tradition: the baroque obsession with transience.

The brief memoir on Robert Walser is in many ways the most interesting in that it comes closer to Sebald the writer, leaving the professional Germanist firmly in the background. For here the discussion is tentative, the knowledge uncertain. Walser's texts point to empty spaces within existence, defying definition. The so-called “microgrammes”, composed when Walser had retreated into an asylum and which have only recently been deciphered by dedicated and skilled Germanists, map an inner emigration which the reader can only ever follow imperfectly. What they reveal, for Sebald, is not a psychotic deterioration but a heroic attempt at self-defence and self-assertion. Against the approaching barbarism of fascist grandiosity Walser's concentration on the miniature, the unconsidered trifles of everyday life, represents a deeply humanist gesture.

These five meditative studies, impressionistic but threaded with neat insights and formulations, are woven into an extended autobiographical essay. The discussion of language, image and rhythm point to Sebald's own practice as a creative writer. Both the techniques of these older colleagues and their existential concerns find echoes in Sebald's fiction. This close affinity accounts for the empathy he brings to his subjects and enables him to reveal the vitality their work still possesses in our very different age.

The final essay deals with the contemporary painter Jan Peter Tripp. The sudden change of direction from word to paint produces an unexpected coda. Tripp's extreme surface naturalism is seen as a subtle challenge to the prosaic viewer. Like the writers Sebald discusses so illuminatingly, the painter poses frames of apparent order which reveal on closer gaze interstices of doubt.