“Sebald is brilliantly visual.

He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see.

Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the detail of so many things hitting the senses in a rain of fleeting simultaneous impressions, but the precise emotional shading and personal import of each of these moments.”

Photographer Rick Poynor offers a dazzling commentary on the “embedded images” in the late W.G.