The Second Circle
Review
THE RINGS OF SATURN
by W.G.Sebald
reviewed by Fin
Keegan
WITH THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF W.G. SEBALD IN 2001, Europe lost one of its greatest
writers. He was born in Germany--the initials stand for
Winfried Georg--in the alpine town of Wertach-im-Allgau
in 1944. Since his early twenties he lived in England,
first in Manchester and then, from 1970, in Norwich, where
he taught at the University of East Anglia. We can safely
say Sebald did not cross the North Sea to hobnob with
the literati: his own agent once claimed never to have
met him. |
THE RINGS OF SATURN
by
W.B. Sebald
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Sebald's work is
striking for its deep-seated indifference to pop culture and the hackneyed
preoccupations of much "serious" fiction. Not for him tales of incest or
lonely novelists spying on their neighbours. Nor does he indulge in the cult
of the whittled-down sentence, the artful vanities of which practise
have ravaged our prose diet in recent decades. Sebald confesses a love of rich,
well-sprung prose that has almost become anachronistic in our style-obsessed
age. His subject--he never loses sight of it--is the Past. But this is
not a personal past of family characters and aesthetic epiphanies, though
the narrators of his best known books are unnamed variations of himself.
Nor is his obsession a Proustian quest for inner certitude: Sebald's narratives
are shifting and not entirely reliable, like a rambling house which conceals
the occasional trapdoor or imprisoned madwoman. As with the coast of East
Anglia itself, continuously evoked in the book under consideration,
our certainties slip away with each successive page, and suspicions foment
that all is not as it seems in this melancholy world, forever resounding
to the echoes of man's inhumanity. Sebald may have lived in sleepy, damp
Norfolk for over a quarter of a century, but he remains as thoroughly and
painfully German as Günther Grass: "I am oppressed by [my country's
history]" he once remarked. "It is a terrible burden."
His first mark in the English-speaking world came with the spectacularly
original The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten, 1992), published
in London in 1996. Not that Sebald was writing fiction for long before
that, his first book, excluding critical studies of German and Austrian
literature, and an as yet untranslated extended narrative in verse, came
out in 1990. (Schwindel, Gefuehle, translated as Vertigo
in 1999).
The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische
Wallfahrt, 1995) sealed his reputation, particularly in Europe where
the Irish Timeswent so far as to pronounce it the "Book of the
Decade".
The book opens in Sebald's keynote register but
the emotional world he describes is anything but understated: he is experiencing
"the emptiness that takes hold of him whenever [he has] completed a long
stint of work." Sebald's solution is to walk the length and breadth of
Suffolk, remedy insufficient to stave off a "paralysing horror" which is
responsible, he speculates, for an unspecified breakdown and subsequent
spell in hospital. All this in the first four sentences of a book which
is later to segue into an extended consideration of the English herring
industry: it is the miracle of his style that we sip all this like vintage
wine. Kafka is invoked and it is but a short step to consideration
of lost friends and their untimely passings. Before we know it we are searching
for the skull of Thomas Browne, author of Urn Burial, a consideration
of the many and varied rites with which human beings mark death and the
disposal of remains. The chapter ends with a Perec-like array of funeral
practice drawn from this latter work.
Sebald's linking method for all this is purely related
to the deep structure of the book, by which I mean that the surface relations
are as arbitrary as possible, in keeping with the writer's disdain for
fictional contrivance: rather than trouble the reader with artful hinges
bereft of thematic purpose or meaning Sebald furnishes the scantiest of
excuses for moving from one subject to the next. Like comedians (and seducers,
for that matter) he knows that these links are fundamentally unimportant
and, like punctuation, a mere matter of convention.
This unabashed freewheeling would be useless were Sebald's ruminations
themselves dreamy or self-regarding. But sensitivity to suffering and loneliness
informs every page. One of the concerns of The Rings of Saturn is
the relationship of human matter to the indwelling spirit. In a Rembrandt
painting of a public dissection--the tableau a veritable icon of enlightenment
confidence--Sebald feels for the corpse and finds in its depiction criticism
of the Cartesian disdain of the physical (needless to say Sebald has discovered
that Descartes and possibly Browne are in the audience). Later in the book
he develops Rembrandt's criticism, finding in history a human propensity
to ignore the obvious fact that all living creatures are sentient, feeling
beings and, from the hunted fish or fox to the forgotten peasant, solitary
eccentric or great poet, capable of suffering pain and terror. There is
an abiding mystery to life, Sebald suggests, and our (Philosophical) Materialism,
in contradiction to its claims, neither copes with, nor recognizes its
inadequacy to cope with, this fact. 
Fin Keegan
Other reviews by Fin Keegan
at
The Second Circle:
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail
Kadare
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
The "Loire-Atlantique" Cycle by Jean Rouaud
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
Justine by Alice
Thompson
Brief Reviews including Donald Antrim and John Lanchester
A Profile of
the Harvill Press
A Profile of
the Editions de Minuit
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