"The Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald

 

Translated from the German by Michael Hulse.

W.G. Sebald eschews character and plot and barely has a unifying framework for his 1998 novel The Rings of Saturn. Instead of these orthodox fictional features, he spends his ten chapters describing his endless walks around Suffolk near the east coast of England. During his peregrinations he considers a range of intriguing topics in the most engaging and evocative language I have read in a very long time. The Rings of Saturn is inspired, wide-ranging, deep, surprising, and unpredictable. Not to mention superb.

Sebald leads off saying he traveled to the east of England to do a study of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a unique and forward-looking scientist and philosopher. Sebald mentions Browne a few more times in the book, but we learn as we go that this will not be his principal focus. Hey traipses across the Suffolk heath in an exhausting walking tour: he tries to find Somerleyton, a great estate of the region, and recaps its many wondrous and excessive features. He gets lost in his wanderings, seemingly more than once, but manages to find a writer he was going to visit—Michael Hamburger, who, as a boy, fled Nazi Germany with his parents in 1933. He considers what it must have been like to experience that, and begins, oddly, to assume the man’s experiences and consciousness as his own.

And just as he rambles across Suffolk, the author’s mind takes trips far and wide. There is no subject beyond his scholar’s ambit: whole towns that once held important places in the regional and national economy have only one tower left before it too will surrender before the advancing sea; the tale of the Ashbury family estate, of some repute in the area, but which at the time of writing, Sebald finds the home is dilapidated, with only the ground floor habitable, and the family distracted and engaged in useless activities, like the building of a boat which the builder acknowledges will never sail, and the sewing together of bridal veils which will never be worn; and finally, the story of Reverend Ives who is visited around 1800 by an exiled young French nobleman. This vicomte falls in love with the Reverend’s daughter during his stay, but returns to France, heartbroken, having confessed that he is already married. We learn at length that the young man is the world-renowned writer and memoirist, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand.

 

The somber palette of loss and decay pervades Rings of Saturn. But that does not make for an unpleasant book. On the contrary, Sebald’s treatment of his theme of the universality of change brings the reader constant surprise and wonder at his erudition. The author travels by foot as if in a dream—indeed, lengthy passages regale of remembered dreams, often going on for pages, in astonishing, impossible detail. This book will treat readers to the author’s erudition, his courtly prose, and his inventive format. Not to be missed!