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One wonders whether such a neat convergence is really possible; but then [Sebald] reproduces the bill, with the name \"Cadavero\" circled. Evidently this tethers the story in fact. But at the same time it gives rise to the opposite suspicion, that seeing the name on the bill led Sebald to invent the whole preceding story. Similarly, in \"Il ritorno in patria\" (Homecoming), the fourth section, Sebald recalls that, during his childhood, Gypsies had set up a camp in his small, remote village. If this seems unlikely to the reader, it is no less so to the author: \"Where they came from, how they had managed to survive the war, and why of all places they had chosen that cheerless spot ... are questions that occur to me only now.\" Then Sebald inserts a photograph of a Gypsy-not from the camp in his town, he says, but taken by his father in Poland during the war. The photo, which explicitly denies that it is evidence of Sebald's story, nevertheless seems to act that way-or else why would it be included? And yet we wonder: Did the photograph lead Sebald to invent the whole story of Gypsies in his hometown? Was the picture taken by his father at all? Or are the coincidences just as he says-truth stranger than fiction?

WG SEBALD'S latest novel is in fact his first, published in German in 1990 and now translated into English following the success of The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. We are reading him back to front, and possibly inside out too, for [WG] Sebald, who has lived in England for 30 years and teaches at the University of East Anglia, does not translate his own works; he leaves that to the poet Michael Hulse, who lives and works in Germany. Observations, anecdotes and memories free-float in the narrator's nervous imagination; signs and symbols, like the doppelganger and the huntsman, dates and gestures, recur with secret significance - or not - from which the reader is deliberately excluded. It is as if the book exists to prove the truth of the narrator's remark: \"The more images I gathered from the past the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.\"

[Max'] Sebald is a German professor of modern German literature at the University of East Anglia. Although he has lived here for nearly 30 years, and speaks faultless English, he still writes in German and is published to great acclaim in his native Germany. His English- language editions are brilliantly translated by Michael Hulse. Friends of mine who know say that Sebald's German is now strangely old-fashioned, as you'd expect from one who has been away from the cut-and-thrust of linguistic innovation in a rapidly changing society for close on a generation. Sebald writes German, they say, `like a ghost'. There could be no better description of Sebald's work. As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell. When you break free from the mesmerising flow of his extraordinary narrative, you have to admit you're not quite sure what it is that you've been reading postmodern fiction, historical essay, off-beat travelogue or intellectual memoir? At least you are in good company. No one else seems to know, either. Harvill, his publishers, also hedge their bets. Vertigo ( pounds 16.99, pp263) is classified as fiction/travel/ history.

Brian Challingworth and chairman of Solihull Parkway Friendship Club Michael Hulse with the Mayor, Councillor Kate Wild Are you looking for friendly face? ARE you retired and looking to meet new friends in Solihull?

Summarized in this way, Austerlitz sounds naturalistic. But, in common with The Emigrants (1996) and The Rings of Saturn (1998), the work relies on certain devices of a marked improbability. The Rings of Saturn, a polymathic excursus, pretends to be merely an account of a therapeutic walk in the country--somewhat as Henry David Thoreau's Walden affects to recount how it feels to live for a year beside a pond in a forest. Austerlitz's structural strangeness results from the story's not being narrated directly by its titular hero. Another man, as sensitive as the now-mature Austerlitz, performs the role of Austerlitz's indefatigable amanuensis. Jacques Austerlitz has trained as an architectural historian, a specialty that permits saturnine expository arabesques on matters such as the London underground. From the blatancy, even the gaucheness, of this authorial artifice, the temptation to accuse Sebald of kitsch must sometimes obtrude itself on the reader. Why, for example, are the voices of the amanuensis and of Austerlitz not more clearly distinguished from each other? Who would really play secretary so meticulously to every utterance of someone whom he meets almost at random, at intervals of years? Austerlitz contains elements that seem prophetic of W.G. Sebald's recent death at the too-young age of 57, in a car collision in England. The image of the homing pigeon recurs in the novel. A bird-obsessed friend of Jacques Austerlitz's, Gerald, loves these animals and extols their celerity of flight, their sagacity in navigation: \"You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle of a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds it will infallibly find its way home. To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin.\" Analogous courage in the face of a void is what Austerlitz himself must muster: but human architecture and human history clutter the domain of human migration; moreover, there remains the insuperable fact that, for him, the place of origin itself has been erased. So Jacques Austerlitz himself more nearly resembles another pigeon described in the novel: \"Once, toward the end of last summer, Tilly the white pigeon did stay away much longer than the homeward flight should have taken her... and it was not until the following day, when [Gerald] was on the point of giving up hope, that she finally returned--on foot, walking up the gravel drive with a broken wing. I often thought later of this tale of the bird making her long journey home alone, wondering how she had managed to reach her destination over the steep terrain.\" A homing pigeon paradoxically embodies two human wishes: to rise above everything and to locate the one place proper to oneself. Emulating his birds, Gerald takes flying lessons, and eventually crashes \"in the Savoy Alps.\" Reflecting on the death of this dear friend, Austerlitz conjectures: \"perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline.\" A fictional character's accident augurs Sebald's own demise, in which both selves (the man and the writer) were extinguished together. Jacques Austerlitz has a male muse in Gerald, even as the narrator of the novel discovers inspiration in Austerlitz himself: a thoroughly male world, with actors as laterally vagabond as Kafka's Hunter Gracchus.

\"The worst thing,\" explains the narrator, \"is this feeling that my brain is slipping down into my face.\" She has none of [Lilli]'s dazzling, dangerous beauty, but she too has dreams, and, while working in the local clothing factory, she sewed notes into the pockets of men's suits bound for Italy. This is the crime for which she is arrested; the price she pays is her endless sequence of interviews with Albu, her interrogator. \"I've been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp,\" she begins, and later adds, \"I've been listening to the alarm clock since three in the morning ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp.\" She sees the world through the eyes of a dreamer, if one who has tried to forget but has also witnessed many horrors, only not quite enough to kill her artist's soul. [Herta Muller], who was born into a German-speaking minority in Timis, in eastern Romania, in 1953, sees the beauty but also hears the viciousness, particularly in the exasperated dialogue. She makes wonderful use of the tram ride to her interrogation. While sitting in the carriage she watches the other passengers, including a father and his small son. The child licks the window as the father dozes off; the narrator looks at the boy's sandals, \"dangling like little toys, as if his parents had dressed him that morning in some of his playthings\". The tram driver steers his way through the streets as if he is in command of a great ship; he becomes involved with the chatter of the passengers and reminds them not to make a mess.

At the time, the pair were attempting to unload 299 spiny lobsters - about $5,000 worth - that they had illegally caught in the Santa Monica Bay marine refuge called District 19A, which is off-limits to commercial fishermen, said Deputy District Attorney Danette Gomez, who is prosecuting the case. [Michael Gordon Hulse] and [Ramon Duran Sambrano] each were charged earlier with grand theft of property belonging to the state of California, felony conspiracy and three misdemeanor counts - including the unlawful use of lobster traps in a restricted area, Gomez said. \"We have (Global Positioning System) tracking evidence that shows he was nowhere near Horseshoe Kelp,\" Gomez said. \"He was in District 19A.\"