Motley Stones

There is a specific narrative move I think of as W.G. Sebald’s—a nesting of one seemingly unrelated story inside another, often with a shift of who is telling the tale, thwarting readerly expectations of where a story will go, a step off the groomed path into a wilderness that might hold anything, where the meaning is not plain but muddied and tangled, fractured by life the way tree roots break up a sidewalk. Turns out, this move is not Sebaldian—it’s Stifterian. Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was an Austrian writer well-known to Sebald, who cited him as an influence, and reading this collection of electrifyingly strange short stories, most named after a type of rock or mineral formation, full of sentences eschewing the comma, that old reliable friend, I felt dazed and dazzled and pulled back toward the days when I was very small, when every story was new, before patterns had been graven into my sense of how things must go or end. These are stories of kindnesses and cruelties, of specific landscapes and storms, of listening and listeners. I loved reading this book and will read it again.