Such sensitivity, such subtlety — this is W.G. Sebald at his best. W.G. who, you may ask. Well, you can hardly be blamed for being unaware of this German writer. In the deafening hype and hoopla of the literary world, it is difficult for an unpretentious artist to make his voice heard.

Sebald might not have been a best-selling author, but he made his presence felt in literary circles, with works of remarkable freshness combining elements of the novel, memoir, biography and travelogue. Unfortunately, he died in a road accident in 2001, just when he seemed to be at his peak. Austerlitz, his elegiac swansong, is perhaps his greatest creation, in which he explores the themes of exile, loss and memory.

It is the story of a man ill-treated by history, a man who feels he doesn’t belong anywhere. An architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz knows a lot about his subject, but next to nothing about his origins. All that he has been told is that he was sent to England at the age of five, brought up by foster parents, and renamed Dafydd Elias.

A conversation between two women on the radio stirs his dormant memory and sends him hurtling down the tunnel of time. Realising that he has wilfully avoided an investigation into his most distant years, Austerlitz begins his odyssey. Searching for his past, he is confronted with that well-nigh unimaginable tragedy — the Holocaust. Personal loss gets entwined with collective loss.

An air of melancholy pervades the work, a sense of despair in the face of the world’s transience. "The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier," feels the writer, "as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself..." Nevertheless, his attempt to stem the inevitable tide is not at all a pointless exercise. The things he tries to protect, like an embalmer, from the ravages of time are magically transformed into invaluable artefacts.

Steering clear of sentimentality, Sebald masterfully weaves memories, dreams and reflections into a seamless whole. The prose is lyrical as well as chiselled to perfection. The brilliance of the writing is exemplified by one sentence, over 2,000 words long, describing what went on in the Theresienstadt ghetto, where "some 60,000 people were crammed together in an area little over 1 sq km." Highly readable and moving despite its length, this passage deserves a place in any anthology of Holocaust literature.

Then there are the beautiful black-and-white photographs, which are no mere adornments, but an integral part of the narrative. They have the permanence their subjects lack. As a woman tells Austerlitz, "One has the impression...of something stirring in them...as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives."