Something about today's bleak weather suits reading The Emigrants by WG Sebald on a train as it chugs westward, past a shifting panorama of bridges, meandering rivers, pine plantations, housing estates (drooping laundry lines, empty trampolines, boarded-up windows), lone ruined cottages, fields in mist and muted greens and, always, a grey sky pierced by black birds in flight. There's a brief, melancholy moment of unhomeliness, an aching sense of the contingency of belonging.





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