The time has come to say something about this writer's extraordinary prose, without which his rambling plots and ruminations would be merely clever and unsettling. Like the coincidences he speaks of, it is a style that recovers, devours, and displaces the past. He has Bernhard's love of the alarming superlative, the tendency to describe states of the most devastating confusion with great precision and control. But the touch is much lighter than Bernhard's, the instrument more flexible. Kafka is present here too, perhaps from time to time Robert Walser, and no doubt others as well. But all these predecessors have been completely digested, destroyed, and remade in Sebald and above all in his magnificent descriptions, which mediate so effectively between casual incident and grand reflection.