It’s funny how some books linger in the mind, long after you’ve turned the last page. W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn has had that effect on me. I wrote about it the other day, when I was just over half-way through, and I had a nice email from my friend and colleague, Martin Weller, who had seen my post and had been looking for something unconnected with work to bring with him on holiday. He’d been moved by what I’d written to get the Sebald book.

It was an unfamiliar literary form for me – a meditative travelogue. But Andrew Motion argued in a recent review of The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane that actually this is a relatively venerable form with its roots “in late 19th-and early 20th-century travelogues of the kind written by Edward Thomas”.

I felt slightly ashamed that I hadn’t known more about Sebald, who died in 2001 aged 57 when his car veered off a foggy road in East Anglia. A friend dug out two newspaper pieces, one an interview by Maya Jaggi published in December 2001, the other the Guardian obituary by his friend and fellow Norfolk resident, Michael Homberger (who features in The Rings of Saturn).

Sebald was born in a small Bavarian village in May 1944, the child of a “working-class, small-peasant” family. His father prospered modestly under the Nazis and rose to the rank of captain in the Wehrmacht. Like many (most?) German children of his generation, Sebald initially knew nothing about what had gone on during the Third Reich. “Until I was 16 or 17”, he told Jaggi, “I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. There it was, and we somehow had to get our minds around it – which of course we didn’t. It was in the afternoon, with a football match afterwards. So it took years to find out what had happened. In the mid-1960s, I could not conceive that these events had happened only a few years back”.

Perhaps this is why his writing is suffused with a preoccupation with memory. And why he always approaches things obliquely. The thing that struck me about The Rings of Saturn was that he always seemed to be coming from left field. Homberger says in his obit that Sebald believed that “attempts to look directly at the horror would turn a writer into stone, or sentimentality”.

The other interesting thing I discovered is that Sebald was a devoted photographer. (The Rings of Saturn is richly illustrated by low-grade reproductions of the kind of pictures taken by someone who uses – as I do — a camera as a kind of visual notebook.) “I’ve always been interested in photographs”, he told Jaggi, “collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. Two years ago in a junk shop in the east End of London, I found a photograph of the yodelling group from my home town. That is a pretty staggering experience. These old photographs always seem to have this appeal written into them, that you should tell a story behind them. In The Emigrants [another of his books] there is a group photograph of a large Jewish family, all wearing Bavarian costume. That one image tells you more about the history of German-Jewish aspiration than a whole monograph would do.”

He’s right. I hope Martin enjoys The Rings of Saturn as much as I did.

From the dessert wine section of a restaurant menu last week…

Alasia Brachetto d’Acqui 6%

Delicious semi sparkling semi sweet pink quaffer, a must for all light desserts, light in alcohol but not in flavour, fantastic nonsense.

Just think: someone sits down with a blank sheet of paper, sucks his/her pencil and writes this stuff.

Seen in Tesco St Neots branch.

I’m reading a truly extraordinary book. It’s the record of a journey on foot through a part of the world that I love – the coast of East Anglia from Suffolk to Norfolk. The author is a German academic who settled in Britain (and taught at the University of East Anglia). He died in 2001.

As he walks through this landscape, Sebald takes his reader on entrancing, serendipitous digressions through history and literature. In Lowestoft, for example, he is reminded of Joseph Conrad, and there then follows an absorbing meditation on Conrad’s life and the experiences which led to The Heart of Darkness — and thence to an equally absorbing digression into the life and death of Roger Casement. (The common link, of course, is the Congo and the brutality of Belgian colonialism which so shocked and horrified both men.) I’m continually astonished by the extent of Sebald’s erudition: his is the best-stocked mind I have ever encountered, with the possible exception of Frank Kermode’s.

I’ve just reached the point where Sebald arrives in Dunwich, a village with an intriguing history.

The Dunwich of the present day is what remains of what was one of the most important ports of Europe in the Middle Ages. There were more than fifty churches, monasteries and convents, and hospitals here; there were shipyards and fortifications and a fisheries and merchant fleet of eighty vessels; and there were dozens of windmills… The parish churches of St James, St Leonard, St Martin, St Bartholomew, St Michael, St Patrick, St Mary, St John, St Peter, St Nicholas and St Felix, one after the other, toppled down the steadily-receding cliff-face and sank in the depths, along with the earth and stone of which the town had been built. All that survived, strange to say, were the walled well-shafts, which, for centuries, freed of what had once enclosed them, rose aloft like the chimney stacks of some subterranean smithy, as various chronicles report, until in due course these symbols of the vanished town also fell down.

Moving on from Dunwich, he meditates on the fact that most of the countryside inland from the coast was once forest, and on the way industrialisation and agriculture gradually deforested Britain – and on how this ‘progress’ is currently being re-enacted in Latin America and the tropics generally.

It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers…

The only problem with this entrancing book is that it has to come to an end — on page 296. Still, I’m only on page 170 at the moment.