I came late to WG Sebald, in the early summer of 2010, although I'd known of him for years. He was one of those surname-only authors whose works it seemed everyone else had read – or else he would crop up stuffily in the footnotes of a certain sort of book.
So until I heard Will Self praising his work on the Today programme, he was simply a name on my to-do list. A task, you might say. Someone to read in hospital, if and when the time came.
But something about Self's enthusiasm persuaded me to buy The Rings of Saturn that lunchtime. Billed as an account of several days spent walking the Suffolk coast – territory I have known and loved since childhood – it ought to make perfect reading for the journey home to East Anglia that evening. And sure enough, as my train clattered and swayed across the shrinking peatlands, I found myself asking where this reluctant German had been all my life.
Over the next 24 hours I learned two things. The first was that many of the people I'd assumed had read Sebald actually hadn't. The second was that The Rings of Saturn isn't an account of a summer's hike down the Suffolk coast. Well, on the surface it is, which is probably why it's the Sebald book that newbies like me generally start with. But after the first few miles, it's pretty obvious that there's a great deal else going on besides the gorse and the deadbeat fishing towns. And that something is, to put it very mildly, man's grotesque inhumanity to man.
A lot of people toss the book aside then. If it's a novel, where's the plot? If it's a travelogue, what's the point? And that's something else I learned that summer, as I urged all and sundry to read it, even buying copies for the faint-hearted: like Michael Gove and his wretched Bibles for schools, most people don't like this stuff.
Those who do, of course, love Sebald to bits, and his death in a car crash in 2001 (he was just 57, and already there had been talk of a Nobel prize for literature) quickly lent him a cult status. Quite naturally, enthusiasts feel the urge to don their walking boots and follow in his footsteps, as if he was some sort of lowland Wainwright who dropped dim, monochrome photos into his text instead of those hiker's-eye sketches of bracken and limestone walls.
And that's so easily how the new film, Patience (After Sebald), might have turned out – a moodier version of the TV series Coast, with some lit-crit bod from the University of East Anglia standing in for Nicholas Crane, and wearing an academic jumper rather than a red anorak, but still bellowing over the screech of surf on shingle.
Happily, though, director Grant Gee has made something still and beautiful – an art documentary in the very best sense – that seemed to me to evoke perfectly the melancholia of Sebald's book while hinting at the horror which lies at the heart of its labyrinth.
Two summers ago, when I had finished The Rings of Saturn, I read Sebald's other books one after the other – ending with The Natural History of Destruction, a series of lectures in which he describes in terrible detail the firebombing of German cities during the second world war and the shroud of silent forgetfulness that enveloped his countrymen and blighted his Bavarian childhood.
After that, I felt compelled to read about the Holocaust, since this was where his route seemed ultimately to lead. And for months afterwards I was at a loss to understand how anybody could write about any other subject ever again.
And now, thanks to Grant Gee and Patience, I have taken The Rings of Saturn down from the shelf and begun once more that southerly trudge along the cliff's edge. It's a path that will never lead to happiness, but I am certain to be in the very best of company.
• Patience (After Sebald) is out now
