Bastam vinte linhas da primeira página para que as lágrimas fujam dos nossos olhos a caminho da luz e possamos exclamar: finalmente, depois de Proust, uma voz humana.

 

The language was a wonder—delicate, dense, steeped in thinghood; but there were ample precedents for that in English. What seemed foreign as well as most persuasive was the preternatural authority of Sebald's voice: its gravity, its sinuosity, its precision, its freedom from all-undermining or undignified self-consciousness or irony.