The eye, dark:as a hut window. It gathers. . . the constellation which theyhumankind, need for dwelling, here,among humankind—Paul Celan, “Hut Window”As Theodor W. Adorno once said of Franz Kafka, so we may say of W. G. Sebald: what baffles and eludes us in his work may one day provide the key to the whole.1 Sebald’s rise to international acclaim was meteoric, the critical consensus of his accomplishment swift; yet, despite this and despite the proliferation of a vast secondary literature—the “Sebald industrial complex,” as one critic quipped2—much of his writing retains an intriguing and incommensurable aspect. To state this is not to petition for scholarly attention to neglected works or hitherto underinvestigated aspects of his Nachlass; even a book like Austerlitz (2001), arguably the most celebrated and remarked on of Sebald’s “prose fiction,” still contains much to confound us.3On the face of it, though, Austerlitz is the most legible of Sebald’s writings and provides the most sustained confrontation with his driving concerns. Inevitably what “must strike every reader,” as Carol Jacobs puts it, is the spectacle of “a postwar German author addressing the Holocaust” with an “ethics of melancholy outrage.”4 Though the éclat of such a claim may be lost to its routineness, Austerlitz is undoubtedly a work that meditates on exile in the wake of historic calamity. “I am living the wrong life [falschen Leben]” is how Jacques Austerlitz, Sebald’s protagonist, articulates his condition.5 An allusion in a work reverberating with allusions, these words refer to an aphorism of Minima Moralia (1951), a phrase into which Adorno compressed the fraught dialectics of exile: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”6 Austerlitz endures such a predicament: sent as a child on a Kindertransport from Prague to the Welsh village of Bala, he lost his family, his language, and his memory. Even his name, discovered as the result of an administrative formality at the age of eighteen, strikes him as a curious and unassimilable fact (A, 68/100). But Austerlitz needs a historian more than a psychologist. The injustices that have indelibly shaped his life cannot be divorced from a world that is itself “deranged” (A, 191/199) and “turned upside down” (A, 243/247)—both English phrases translating the single German word falschen—just as, in “Refuge for the Homeless,” Adorno observes: “Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. . . . It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”7To assimilate Sebald’s work into the familiar discussion of exile fails to account, however, for the most conspicuous and, to my mind, vital feature of his prose aesthetics. For Sebald, the vocation of literature—and, more specifically, prose—lies in the travails and illuminations of making connections among things. In an essay on Robert Walser, he forcefully expounds the significance of such interconnections, not simply as a world view, but as a kind of manifesto on prose form: I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have been working as a clerk in a joint-stock brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from the window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own excursions, dates of birth with dates of death, fortune with misfortune, the history of nature with the history of our industry, that of homeland with that of exile.8The characteristic features of Sebald’s prose style stem from these convictions: his baroque, accretive, composite way of making meaning through a montage of photographs, citations, ekphrastic passages, and allusions; his dense patterning of filiations, interlocking motifs, and associations; and his residual faith in fortuitous concurrence, coincidence, and the urgings of intuition and obsession. “My method of procedure,” as he sums it up: “patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things”; asking “what the invisible connections that determine our lives are, and how the threads run.”9If we conceive of Austerlitz in these terms, mindful of its poetics of association, it is a work that considers exile in form as much as in narrative. To create and maintain interconnections (Zusammenhänge) thus appears as the ground for dwelling, while exile lies in the sensation of collapse (Zusammenbruch) when, all at once, in terms that the protagonist uses to describe an episode of traumatic dissociation: “I could see no connections any more” (A, 175–76/184).10 To insist on the significance of association is to intuit an urgency in the seemingly unassuming question Austerlitz asks when he first learns his true name and can “connect no ideas at all with the word”: “but what does it mean?” (A, 94–96/102–4). Austerlitz—a name we will come to connect to many things—depicts nothing less than the drama of forming associations, one that is shared by the protagonist, narrator, writer, and, as I hope to clarify, us, the readers.In this spirit, I trace several modes of interconnection in Austerlitz, beginning with a digression, pursuing a citation, and finally mapping a network of recurring architectural motifs, only to arrive at a site where the troubling and pregnant entanglement of images compels a difficult process of readerly judgment. By concluding on the question of judgment, I also raise the question of what Sebald calls “restitution” (Restitution).11 In an address given less than a month before his death, Sebald offered a tentative answer to a question inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin: “So what is literature good for?” His answer divines a political promise in prose form—in the work of forming “strange connections” among things.12 In 1985, years before he wrote his first fiction, Sebald had already mounted a remarkable vindication of melancholy connection-making, declaring it a form of resistance. “In the description of the disaster,” as he put it, “lies the possibility of overcoming it.”13 For Sebald, associative prose writing amounts at best to a kind of “imaginative excellence,” to use the felicitous phrase of Jonathan Lear: a style of thinking that toils to hold open a space for a good we still lack appropriate concepts to understand.14 For the purposes of this article, I call this imaginative excellence judgment—an “enlarged way of thinking” (eine erweiterte Denkungsart) in Immanuel Kant’s words, which, in Hannah Arendt’s, “trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”15 In looking to judgment—particularly as rendered in Arendt’s reading of its critical and reflective power in Kant’s third Critique—I hope to bring to the foreground the political aspect of this generative capacity to make unprecedented connections between things. For it is not simply that the reader is implicated in the text’s association of ideas: this implication has a normative force. In this spirit, I offer an analysis of Austerlitz that “refuses the incomprehensibility of trauma in the name of political judgement,” as Lyndsey Stonebridge has it in The Judicial Imagination (2011),16 taking inspiration both from Linda Zerilli’s interventions into political theory by way of Arendt’s unfinished work on judgment and from Lisa Robertson’s efforts to situate “a description of what reading could be” by appeal to Arendt’s Life of the Mind.17 Like Stonebridge, Zerilli, and Robertson, I find Arendt’s reflections on thinking, willing, and judging to be fertile ground, especially in seeking to dwell on a literature of confounding interconnection. For Austerlitz is, above all, a work that builds a constellation of associations, solicits readerly judgment, and trains our imaginations to go visiting—a text whose pleasures and obliquities are akin to what Kant calls in Critique of Judgment the harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding. Perhaps, for reasons like these, Sebald chose not the eschatologically charged term redemption but the somewhat modest, judicial word restitution when seeking to describe the “good” of literature._________On the most obvious, and therefore routine reading, Austerlitz concerns the recovery of repressed, traumatic memories. There is much in the text to suggest this—that it is, as Jacques Austerlitz tells the narrator, a case of overcoming “the resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory” (A, 300–301/308). If we take this approach, if Austerlitz is, as Todd Samuel Presner suggests, “a textbook case of the return of the repressed,” then there is very little for the critic to add; the book would seem “to lend itself almost effortlessly to an analysis using the Freudian concepts of trauma theory.”18 Presner, who is skeptical of the reductiveness of such a reading—reductive, that is, to both Sebald and Sigmund Freud—sketches out its coordinates all the same. Much of what he outlines is already well told in the literature: what Freud calls the “traumatic moment,” in this case the loss of Austerlitz’s family and identity during the Shoah, are “repressed into the unconscious,”19 which leads, in Austerlitz’s words, “finally, and unavoidably . . . to the almost total destruction of my linguistic faculties . . . and my hallucinations which plagued me with increasing frequency up to the point of my nervous breakdown” (A, 198/206).Among the issues immediately evident in this approach is that it has little to say about Austerlitz’s form. Even if Austerlitz is, as many critics insist, the most conventional and novelistic of Sebald’s prose fictions, it is far from being a conventional novel. Indeed, for Sebald, it is “a prose book of indefinite form,” “a long prose elegy.”20 Why, for instance, should our attention be on the protagonist, who undergoes this “reconstructive odyssey,”21 and not, to use the very term with which Freud came to amend his early trauma theory, the “transference valence,” the fixation between Austerlitz and another man, the narrator? For at the center of the book is, as Andreas Huyssen argues, a “gray zone of identification” that allows for “reciprocal mimetic approximation without blurring the distinction between German narrator and Jewish protagonist.”22 To shift the focus onto this dynamic of identification between the narrator and Austerlitz is to open up the question of the conspicuous stylistic features of Sebald’s prose and, above all, the process of association that is the foundation of the transference valence. To do justice, then, to the centrality of interconnection in Austerlitz, we must already move beyond treating it as a memoir of reckoning with unrepresentable traumas.One of the first things the narrator observes about Austerlitz is the virtuosic, extempore manner in which he “put his ideas together as he talked” (seine Gedanken beim Reden verfertigte) (A, 14/22).23 This line alludes, I think, to a prose fragment of Heinrich von Kleist, “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking,” 1805), which describes the strenuous yet intuitive connection making—the “excitement of the mind”—required simply to “wrest a train of thought.”24 Kleist’s argument, a suggestive one for understanding Sebald’s prose, is that sentences do not record prefabricated thoughts but are the occasion for thinking. “Because I do have some obscure inkling,” Kleist writes, that harbours a distant relation to that which I am seeking, if I only utter a first bold beginning, as the words tumble out, the mind will, of necessity, strain to find a fitting ending, to prod that muddled inkling into absolute clarity, such that, to my surprise, before I know it the process of cognition is complete. I mix in unarticulated sounds, draw out the conjunctions, add an apposition, even though it may not be necessary, and make use of other speech-stretching rhetorical tricks to gain time enough to hammer out my idea in the workshop of reason. . . . For it is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows.25Instead of searching for a narrative core in Austerlitz that would corral its digressions and associations into a single, centripetal form, I here take a different path, one that aims to limn the motions of the thinking mind in Sebald’s prose. This involves some risk, not least because Sebald licenses a certain reductiveness.26 The “dark centre” to his writing, he tells Michaël Zeeman, is the Shoah, his aesthetics a way to calibrate an approach that describes the catastrophe “obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than direct confrontation.”27 There is nothing to object to here, yet there remains a question, one that is succinctly articulated by Freud in the context of dream imagery. Even if all dream imagery can be said with confidence to represent the fulfillment of an unconscious wish, the question still remains: Why does the dreamer dream this specific image, and not another? Similarly, why does Sebald’s narrator make one set of connections and follow one set of digressions, in a certain way and with a certain vim, and not another? We may decide to literalize his digressions through their relationship to the Shoah, but this literalization does not exhaust the task of interpretation: it is only its starting point. To that end, I wish to begin by tracking the formation of a thought by close reading a digression in Austerlitz.The book’s first significant digression is occasioned when, on the urgings of a coincidence, the narrator visits Fort Breendonk in Belgium. Breendonk is a chain of concrete bunkers constructed before the outbreak of World War I that was used by the Nazi SS as a prison and transit camp between 1940 and 1944. What immediately strikes the narrator about Breendonk is how it incarnates “ugliness and blind violence”: the “hunched and misshapen” forms of its compounds appear like the backbone of “a monster,” “a whale”; its body erupts in protrusions and ulcers; even its ground plans and blueprints, he tells us, resemble an “alien and crab-like creature” (A, 25–28/33–36). Given this excursion arises by chance—by the sheer fact that Breendonk was present both in the narrator’s conversation with Austerlitz and in a newspaper he happened to be glancing at—it may already be a digression, but it becomes one in the more precise sense when an iron hook jutting from the ceiling elicits an excursus that runs for several pages. At the sight of this hook, the narrative shifts from the register of travel writing to report the “drift of . . . ideas” (A, 170/178). We are told, for instance, that the “nauseating smell of soft soap” is linked “in some strange place in my head . . . to the bizarre German word for scrubbing-brush, Wurzelbürste, which was a favourite of my father’s and which I had always disliked” (A, 33/41). A queasy sensation follows—“black striations . . . quiver before my eyes” (A, 33/41)—and the narrator is led to apophatically raise an experience he could not have “guessed at”: an inkling of the experience of Jean Améry (A, 34/42), an Austrian-born writer and survivor of Auschwitz, who was interned and tortured in Breendonk and later, like Paul Celan, scrambled the letters of his patronym, Mayer, into a logogriph that connotes the French amer, or “bitter.”28 Interruption, obliqueness, and distancing of a mind “thinking freely in extremis,” as Sebald puts it in an essay on Améry, are central to a work the narrator is here citing: Améry’s Par-delà le crime et le châtiment (1966), or At the Mind’s Limits.29 Indeed, at the moment when Améry comes close to touching the asymptote of his wound, he deviates; his attention swerves from the wounded body back to language itself: “My own body weight caused luxation; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from the Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology!”30 Almost mimetic to this abrupt shift in register, Austerlitz’s citation of Améry jolts into the French of another victim of torture, the narrator of Claude Simon’s Le jardin des plantes (1997). A crucial intertext for Austerlitz, Le jardin des plantes is structured as a series of memory fragments in slabs of abutting, tessellated text that at first seem arranged something like pruned hedgerows of the Paris park to which its title refers, but later coalesce into longer stretches of narrative, compulsively returning to the same disquieting memories. Central among these episodes, and the one that occupies Sebald’s narrator over several pages, is “the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli” (A, 34–36/42–44).What links Améry to the Italian artist Novelli is that they both suffered the same form of torture at the hands of the Nazis, but from this common starting point Sebald’s narrator allows his thoughts to follow the unusual, serpentine course of Novelli’s life after the war. Unable to stomach the sight of “a German, or indeed of any so-called civilized being” (A, 35/43), Novelli boarded the first boat that could take him to South America, where, in the remote basin of the Amazon, he devoted himself to prospecting for diamonds and gold.31 Abandoned in the jungle, he was taken in by “a tribe of small, gleaming, coppery people” (A, 35/43). After living with them for some time and learning their language, he improvised an eccentric, macaronic script to record it, ransacking the many alphabets of Europe. For the tribe’s language, we are told, consists “almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations of intonation and emphasis” (A, 35/43). Later, Novelli returned to Italy, where he became a visual artist. “His main subject, depicted again and again in different forms and compositions,” as the narrator concludes his digression, was the letter A, which he scratched into the coloured ground he had applied, first with his pencil, then with the stem of his brush or an even coarser instrument, in ranks of scarcely legible ciphers crowding closely together and above one another, always the same and yet never repeating themselves, rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream.AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA(A, 35–36/43–44)The enthralling, possibly apocryphal account of the life of Novelli occupies an important place in Austerlitz. In a work that lays bare various states of disfluency and aphasia wrought by history’s wounds, Novelli seems, following his own maverick path, to have stumbled on the mythic origin of language in its so-called primitive form. In seeking to parse the “deep mystery” of Novelli’s “AAAAAAAAA . . . ,” Jessica Dubow and Richard Steadman-Jones place it in the context of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781) and Enlightenment discourses on rhetoric and la clarté. The reputed clarity of French—the language that Austerlitz speaks to the narrator with a “natural perfection” (A, 42/50), contrasting with his stilted English—is defined by an orderliness “so propitious, so necessary for reasoning,” as Antoine de Rivarol puts it, which contrasts with “sensation,” or the tendency to follow the whimsies of that “which strikes one first.”32 Rousseau turns this distinction into a narrative of development in which the first, simple language is one of sensation that later matures into a multifaceted language—presumably French—ruled by reason. Placed in this context, Novelli’s primal cry “returns one,” according to Dubow and Steadman-Jones, “to a scene of origin when language had not yet been claimed by reason and simultaneously speaks for a more contemporary moment,” making it “a primordial response to present unreason.”33 This utterance in the wake of catastrophe has a force that, as Alexander Regier memorably characterizes Kant’s analytic of the sublime, is both shattering and foundational.34But what is perhaps most striking about Novelli’s “AAAAAAAAA . . . ” is that it is an exclamation drawn; its syntax is not spoken or enunciated but visual. Sebald, likewise, chooses not to represent it with a series of majuscule As composited in a manner consistent to his text—as the quotation above does—but with a slightly warped and xeroxed image of a block of As: a photo, we might suppose, from a page of Simon’s novel, where it appears in several different arrangements. In Novelli’s paintings, however, the letter has none of this evenness: running on sloping, irregular grids, it has the status of the signature, an authenticating mark inscribed over and over on the surface of the canvas. Much like Cy Twombly, to whom he is often compared and who also spent his formative years as a painter in 1950s Rome, Novelli elevates an erratic, calligraphic drawing of writing, a graphism, a primitive, sensual mark-making achieved through scratching and scraping, into the principal feature of a new kind of abstraction, one that powerfully records the presence of the body-in-writing (see fig. 2).35 In addition to these letters, Novelli sparsely and spasmodically populates canvases of translucent green and garish, creamy whites with grids and detached body parts, giving them the resonate titles like “Archivo per la Memoria” that punctuate Simon’s novel: Senza sonno (Without sleep)Il sole nudo (The naked sun)Cada vez mas (Each time more)Visibilità 2 (Visibility 2)La luce nelle mani (Light in one’s hands)Poco per poco (Little by little)36Yet where, for Twombly at least, the A is a letter associated with violence, for Novelli it has a more ambivalent valence. In Twombly’s Vengeance of Achilles (1962), for instance, the shape of the A stands for Achilles’s mythic vehemence (see figs. 1 and 3). This towering painting, first displayed at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, depicts Achilles, “in vertical portrait style,” as Mary Jacobus puts it, “as an abstract, sharply pointed, fire-tipped weapon, somewhere between a gigantic javelin and a rocket trailing tendrils of smoke.”37 Katharina Schmidt similarly notes how the “colossal vertex occup[ies] the entire picture field,” its A evoking both the memorial stele and the weighty spear Achilles alone could handle.38 But for Novelli—especially in the context of Simon’s novel and Sebald’s Austerlitz—the shape of the A portends something modest, possibly even restitutive, like tents or huts etched into the material of the canvas, each letter being another small exertion in the attempt to speak again, no matter how shrill and unintelligible, in the wake of the disaster. It is as if, beginning from the first letter, Novelli attempted to build a new lexicon in the hope of finding himself once more capable of inhabiting and making sense of the world. The passage that immediately juxtaposes Simon’s account of Novelli’s linguistic efforts describes the narrator cutting “poles from brushwood” to “erect a primitive shelter.”39 It is a passage that recalls the diction of Exodus, where it is said of the Israelites that “they will make an ark of shittim wood” (25:10), but instead, in the drizzle, Simon says of the bivouacking soldiers: “They will surround [ils élèveront autour] the tent with a low wall made of dirt pulled between two screens of interlaced twigs.” They must do this even though they “do not have tents in the proper sense of the word, but only squares of waterproof canvas.”40 With a different square of canvas, Novelli heeds the same imperative—to find a shelter in these shack-like letters, to recover a will to speak by drawing writing._________Not all digressions in Austerlitz appear in the guise of a meticulously reconstructed train of thought; many are the condensed potential for digression in the form of citation, an incitement for the reader to build her own connections from the text. The sense of déjà lu induced by what Sebald calls the “incredible number of hidden, obliterated citations” is a central and often remarked feature of his prose style.41 This imbrication of allusions is so dense, in fact, that one Germanist more inclined to accounting found that only “around 15%” of one of his books concerned the narrative proper, the rest being taken up with digressions and “intertextual and other cultural references.”42 In Austerlitz Sebald draws explicit attention to the work’s citational aesthetics by fashioning the title character partially after Walter Benjamin—a writer who, in his monumental, unfinished study of nineteenth-century Paris, pushed a technique of citation to its limits. Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk, or The Arcades Project, amounts, at its most radical, to an argument advanced implicitly through the curation and juxtaposition of quotations, or as he remarked early on in the undertaking that would occupy him for the last thirteen years of his life: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not describe but put on display.”43 Sebald refers to this exemplary work of citation by modeling Austerlitz’s interminable investigations of “the architecture of the capitalist era” on The Arcades Project. Like The Arcades Project, Austerlitz’s study is loosely organized into “Konvolute,” or “stacks” (A, 43/51) and “bundles” (A, 171/179), as Anthea Bell variously renders this uncommon German term.44 Again, like Benjamin, Austerlitz’s task proliferates into thousands of pages of notes, following an obsessive and vertiginous pattern of regression, a digressive mise en abîme as he loses himself in the small print in the footnotes of the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from a scientific description of reality into the strangest details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. (A, 363/370–71)This regressive pattern is apparent also in Austerlitz’s “periscopic” narration in which a number of voices, sometimes three or more, are mediated through the narrator’s voice with the constant, metronomic repetition of er sagte . . . er sagte . . . as in “Věra told me, said Austerlitz” (sagte Vera zu mir, sagte Austerlitz) (A, 242/250).45 The significance of the link to The Arcades Project, however, is that it signals an aesthetic preoccupation shared by Benjamin and Sebald. For Benjamin, to write history means, as he puts it in The Arcades Project, “to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation.”46 In the same spirit, in an essay on Jan Peter Tripp, Sebald stresses: “Remembrance . . . is nothing but a citation. And the citation incorporated in a text (or painting) by montage compels us . . . to probe our knowledge of other texts and pictures and our knowledge of the world. This, in turn, takes time. By spending it, we enter into time recounted and into the time of culture.”47 Incorporating a “pre-text” through citation, the text bids readerly digression.48 Citation, then, like digression, alights on the judging faculty by which the mind builds connections and associates ideas; it is, to quote a work of exemplary “digressive skill,” part of Sebald’s attempt to write “a history book . . . of what passes in a man’s own mind.”49These words are taken from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), a book to which Austerlitz subtly, yet unmistakably, alludes. Speaking of the distinctive lunacy of siege architecture, Austerlitz refers to “the inflated excesses of the professional vocabulary of fortification and siegecraft”; its lexicon of words that “no one now understands, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, réduit and glacis” (A, 18/26). These terms appear—along with many others and without their estranging italics—in Tristram Shandy. Uncle Toby, a military veteran who received a wound to his groin at the Siege of Namur (1695), less than one hundred kilometers from Breendonk, has a “hobby-horsical” preoccupation for siege architecture.50 He re-creates fortifications in miniature out on his bowling green, reprising, with another wounded veteran, the battles of the Seven Years’ War. With his “brains so full of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery,” there is never an occasion “so foreign or unfit” for him to find some way to relate it back to siegecraft.51To map such instances of unmarked citation continues to be the raison d’être for numerous essays on Sebald. There are articles, for instance, on Sebald’s allusions to Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marcel Proust that advance no argument, perhaps in the implicit conviction that, even where recycling each other’s examples, such explication is an end in itself. This spectacle—the text’s coy solicitations answered by painstaking readerly excursus—points, I think, to a crucial and less-remarked aspect of Sebald’s prose aesthetics. There is a quality to a work like Austerlitz that resists the hermeneutic gaze: something also evident, for instance, in critical efforts to describe the “melancholy” of Sebald’s books—melancholy itself being an associative mood for Sebald. As a mood or tone, melancholy exceeds efforts to reduce it to specific, isolatable features. To enumerate aspects of the text such as, say, its sombre, granular, black-and-white photographs and persistently inclement weather deployed as an extended metaphor falls curiously short of capturing the meaning of melancholy in the text. This same inadequacy dogs scholarly accounts of intertextuality: after explicating a reference, sometimes throughout an article, critics fall silent at the cusp of its deeper import. Sensing this inadequacy, they at times shift to describing their experiences reading Sebald. “I sat at the bus shelter . . . reading W. G. Se