The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald
A beautiful way of thinking. Robert Silman, in a blurb on the front cover, says, “Stunning and strange… like a dream you want to last forever.”
I fell asleep reading this book two days ago and dreamt of strange Chinese mass suicides and woke up with a leg and an eye twitching.
Sebald transitions, often within a paragraph, from glowing herring to the history of citylights to a forgotten maritime battle to an English hurricane to a biography of Joseph Conrad. And all done seamlessly, in the logic of interest and exploration and awe, which is closer to reality (the logic, the “storyline”) than any book I have ever read.
If I were the surgeon general of the west, I would readily prescribe afternoon constitutionals with W.G. Sebald.
“It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal.”
“…but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air.”
“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow.”