The book reads as a single afternoon walk that never quite ends. Sebald sets out on the Suffolk coast and within a chapter is in seventeenth-century China, then a herring factory, then Borges, then a country house, then the wars. The walk is a thread that lets him pull anything in.
The photographs do work that I keep underestimating. They are bad photographs on purpose — grainy, off-center, often of things that aren’t quite the thing under discussion. They keep the prose honest. You can’t drift into the purely literary when a photograph of a hedge is sitting on the page next to you.
Returning to the herring chapter. The detail is not, strictly, necessary to the argument — there isn’t an argument — but the catalogue of weights and dates and ships is what makes the melancholy land. Without the data the grief would float.
I want to read it again with a map. The geography on a first read is impressionistic; on a second read the routes should sharpen up.