Serpents coiling around each other is Seethaler’s way of describing inch-thick twining cables stretched across swathes of sky.

‘Cables twenty-five millimetres thick and interwined like pairs of mating adders would slice through the sky across a distance of almost two thousand metres.’

For other snaking similes and metaphors, see Tarka the Otter, Christopher Logue’s War Music, and Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan.

Source: Robert Seethaler, A Whole Life, trans. Charlotte Collins (London: Picador, 2015), pp. 10-11

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