WG Sebald. 
 
Translated by Michael Hulse. 
 
New Directions: 1996.  First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Very good. Slight foxing on the top edge, small smudge on the jacket spine. Otherwise a crisp copy. 
 
“Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced - consciousness - and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next.”