Am reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.

What a great novel! It has a first person narrator, who I guess is supposed to be Sebald himself—an emigrant from Germany to the UK. And he relates the story of four other emigrants he’s encountered in his life. All these four men are sad and thwarted, and yet slightly heroic. The stories are probably fictional, but they’re related in such a matter of fact way, and with so little in the way of traditional structure and character arc, that they feel very true.

If I was reading this for the first time at age 26 it would definitely one-shot me, and I’d be like, “This is how novels should be written!” (which is basically what happened to Ben Lerner).