Brian Castro

Later, at a reception given by the Goethe Institute I was finally introduced to Sebald and was somewhat taken aback by the warmth, the quiet laughter behind the spectacles, the ingenuous manner. ‘Call me Max,’ he suggested, when I struggled with his initials, and I believe that was when I gathered the courage to make a small medical diagnosis of the narrator in The Rings of Saturn, whom I recognised immediately as one suffering from a slipped spinal disc…

There was a kind of shuffling about. People looked uneasy, as though a crime were about to be committed. Somebody coughed as sirens sounded in the distance, then an old woman who looked as though she had been asleep, her head back and her mouth open, took up the skein of talk like a trout after a fly.