On 28 February 1989, a matter of days after the publication of what he had described as the first volume of a tetralogy, the Swiss writer Hermann Burger kept a long-held promise and killed himself. The world could not say it had not been warned: from his first novel, Schilten (1976), about a school teacher who prepares his pupils for death, to his collection of aphorisms Tractatus logico-suicidalis (1988), a gathering of over a thousand ‘mortologisms’ on the logic of self-slaughter, Burger was nothing if not consistently morbid. To rehearse Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph, he had told us he was ill.

That Burger’s warnings were not taken seriously during his lifetime owes much to his consistently difficult, narcissistic character. Declaring that he had no need to save money given his intention to die young, Burger drove around in a Ferrari, wore expensive white suits, performed magic tricks for politicians and offended almost everyone with whom he came into contact. Manic highs were accompanied by crippling lows, bursts of frenetic activity by months of inactivity. It must have been all too easy to write him off as just another mad Alpine depressive.

Yet Burger was also capable of extraordinary writing. The only one of these four books to be completed, Brenner tells the barely fictionalised tale of Burger’s sorry life. In both structure and style, it is dominated by his enduring obsession with cigars: in twenty-five chapters – the number of cigars in a traditional humidor – it relates the author’s childhood memories in expansive, post-prandial prose. Born into a cigar-producing family, Hermann Arbogast Brenner grows up in small-town Switzerland, briefly (and traumatically) attends a boarding school and nurtures a sense of grievance through forty-six years of almost unrelenting bitterness. An appealing character he is not.

That he is a character, however, is the secret to Burger’s achievement. Brenner’s narrative is a performance, heightened to absurdity. It is such a performance, indeed, that it is at times difficult to know whether it is all meant to be taken seriously, whether it is intended as tragedy or comedy. The obvious point of comparison, in this regard as in many others, is Burger’s contemporary Thomas Bernhard, another Alpine obsessive eaten up by misanthropy. Bernhard defined himself as an Ubertreibungskünstler, an artist of exaggeration; in his vituperative self-loathing and stylistic excesses, in his stubborn self-pity and rococo remembrances, Burger takes exaggeration to an unprecedented pitch of intensity.

The other main pole of Burger’s style is Marcel Proust. It is Proust’s influence that generates moments of lilting, moving beauty that alleviate the intensity. From the first chapter onwards, Burger consciously styles his project as Proustian, presenting his home village as a ‘Helvetian Combray’ and his subject matter as a search for lost time. Cigars are his madeleines, with every chapter placed under the sign of a different master blend. Above all, Burger’s style – and really, the book is all style, since the events narrated are mostly of little consequence – is self-consciously Proustian, the prose circling around childhood memories in long, cascading sentences that ‘annihilate space and time’ like the heady tobacco smoke that swirls around Brenner’s head. ‘The crabwalk of creation’, Burger writes, ‘we can imagine only as collapsing in on us from all sides, like the mass grave of the universe folding over on itself, reduced to a Jupiter-like spinning top’. As long as the prose keeps spinning, we are still alive.

Burger’s dizzying prose presents a challenge for the translator. Adrian Nathan West has performed heroics in producing this English version. Burger’s style and sentence structures are of Joycean complexity. The difficulty is compounded by long stretches of technical language about the cultivation of tobacco and the production of cigars. And then there is the Swiss dialect, the shifting registers of which have no direct equivalent in English. Quibble as one might with particular choices or points of emphasis, West has completed an immense labour of love in making Burger’s masterpiece available to an English-language audience.

Brenner is nothing if not literary. References abound to ancestor texts: Brenner is like the third generation of Mann’s Buddenbrooks, fated to decadence; Burger is like the narrator of Broch’s Death of Virgil, defined by doom. Above all, Brenner is a work of self-conscious lateness, its ‘late-style pretensions’ embedded in its abstract syntax and retrospective logic. The closing chapters’ references to Struwwelpeter, that macabre collection of 19th-century children’s stories, reinforce the theme of the ageing adult’s return to a distant, traumatic childhood. Burger’s book, to change after-dinner metaphors, is not so much a cigar as a Spätlese, the ripest of vintages.