“The sound my country makes”

Reviewing Marianne Wiggins's latest novel, The Shadow Catcher, has sent me back to reading Sebald, and both of them, and Grace Paley too, oh, and the fact of my own novel out in bookstores, and my reaction last week to the commuting of Kenneth Foster's sentence (Something good actually happened? Something good actually happened?) has me thinking about my own uneasy relationship to the culture I live in. More on that later, no doubt.

In the meantime, a little Sebald. From Vertigo:

"How I wished during those sleepless nights that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all."

And this idea of his that has long interested me, from an interview with Arthur Lubow:

“There is so often about the standard novel something terribly contrived, which somewhere along the line tends to falter,” he said. “The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along, that’s fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on. Very often you don’t know who the narrator is, which I find unacceptable. The story comes through someone’s mind. I feel I have the right to know who that person is and what his credentials are. This has been known in science for a long time. The field of vision changes according to the observer, so I think this has to be part of the equation.”