A man walks the Suffolk coast and the walk keeps opening into other things. A skull, a herring fishery, Thomas Browne’s missing remains, the silk trade, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, the Taiping rebellion, a collapsing country house, the hurricane of 1987 that flattened the woods. Sebald moves by association with no chapter breaks and grainy photographs dropped in unlabeled, and the cumulative subject is destruction — how much of it there has been, and how the landscape holds it quietly. Nobody else writes sentences like this, and the book invented a whole mode that people are still copying. I’d happily do that, too, if I ever finished the book. It’s digressive, discursive, transgressive—all good, but the density of British place names and dated cultural references made it tough sledding for this Amurican.