In the four stories that make up “The Alps in the sea”, the Author’s deep loneliness shows through his painful considerations about Man’s cruelty and misery. At the same time it carries a wish for understanding: the lonely living in a meaningless world open to a wish of sharing with the readers. A reader himself, Sebald knows well about the emotion of sharing, as one can find in his short essay “Le Promeneur solitaire – The lonely walker” on the Swiss author Robert Walser, whom Sebald feels close to and whose plight is drifting “into an abyss of frost and stars - alone”.