W. G. Sebald, a writer who died in 2001 at the early age of 57, wrote strange books that resist categorization: they combine fiction, criticism, biography, and scrapbook.

"Max" Sebald wrote in German in a style that was (at least in Michael Hulse's English translations) both precise and completely mysterious. In books like Austerlitz and The Emigrants, paragraphs begin with numbing specificity and then continue for pages, drifting in and out of various characters' points of view. His great theme was (I think) the displacement of individuals from their pasts. This has something to do with Sebald's personal history: the Germany where he grew up was committed to a kind of collective amnesia about the Second World War. As he grew older, Sebald said, the memory of his dead made him anxious--and when he was in his middle 40s, he began constructing his weird, elusive books.