Thomas Browne, born in 1605, while living in Holland in 1632, witnessed “the dissection of a corpse…undertaken in public at the Waaggebouw in Amsterdam—the body being that of Adriaan Adriaanszoon alias Aris Kindt, a petty thief of that city who had been hanged for his misdemeanours an hour or so earlier.” Thomas Browne, an early modern precursor to experimental scientist and doctor, is about the only constant in The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald besides the author himself and his presence in England. Astoundingly different from most fiction, Sebald charts his travels across the Northern coast of England without any traditional narrative arc, but embellishing and bringing to fore the criss-crossing threads of history and relations that exist in each small town he visits.
Sebald alludes to these threads that he drags into the sunlight, and to the structure of the book and with chapter descriptions such as: “IV The Battle of Sole Bay – Nightfall – Station Road in The Hague – Mauritshuis – Schevingen – The Tomb of St Sebolt – Schiphol airport – The invisibility of man – The Sailors’ Reading Room – Pictures from the Great War – The concentration camp at Jasenovac on the Sava.” When Sebald has exhausted the curiosity of one object of examination, he turns his attention to some new detail to pull him deeper into lengthy prose, and when the topic has exhausted itself, he returns to his physical location along the English North Coast, for a moment, describing what surrounds him and focusing on some concrete detail of his travel.
The Rings of Saturn is a somewhat disorienting text, though rewarding if one can adapt to its norms. As Sebald turns between topics, his prose too mimics the style of each chapter. Sentences begin in one place, with certain assumed intentions, but inserting commas and clauses, Sebald questions the reader’s awareness of the subject at hand. Sebald’s prose is often disorienting for this reason, but entirely legible with some patience and active reading. In the same way that his sentences meander about, chapters follow the same pattern, drawing you in despite the complexity of Sebald’s topic. If one reads The Rings of Saturn in passivity—as I mistakenly did from time to time—one will continually be caught by surprise by the pace at which he passes between his surrounding environment, to a historical figure, to an art historical analysis of some major work, and so on, until we’ve arrived again at his physical location in North England.
This movement between topics and the photographic zoom that Sebald employs in his work is surely the greatest flourish and skill that he employs. It is the defining unique characteristic of this work. Sebald’s tact in employing this zoom is great—he writes with intellectual depth and analysis, providing the undressing detail found in deeply particular historical monographs and the like. Yet this depth’s purpose is not the pursuit of some larger question posed towards the beginning of the book, nor some inherent interest of a particular figure, but the simple temporal and spatial relation that exists between he and the topic. In the course of a third or quarter of a chapter, he might begin with a description of a structure he has seen on his walk in Blyth, before finding a connection to the train system posited some years ago, then descending into a deconstruction of the rise and fall of a Chinese royal household. And these explanations are ones a historian might render in her own book. The reader is often caught off guard by the sheer depth that Sebald buries himself to, waiting to come up for air.
This style begins to feel apocryphal as Sebald glides from topic to topic, but there is little question that the author has tied his knots. At times, the text can feel reminiscent of The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, where the main character disconnectedly retrains his focus on the finches or flowers that surround his home. The narration begins to feel disconnected as an elderly man’s mind, not beset by mental illness, but the simple dulling that the passage of time bequeaths. Similarly, Sebald drags us between topics with similar carelessness towards the reader, but his hairpin turns are solid and proven rather than disconnected. Indeed Sebald pulls his reader on, though they may become reluctant to a certain point, as a young child listening to grandpa recount war stories.
Where the reader is lost to these deadening details, the reward is the sometimes half page long conclusions of wisdom that Sebald furnishes. From hundreds of pages of intrigue and historical particularlity, Sebald creates perhaps only several conclusions of divinely quotable wisdom. These pockets of deft understanding about human nature and the way memory embeds itself are the points that make the book so rewarding, mimicking the course of so many lives—through so much labor, only in small snippets do we find worth. And yet, for most of these wonderful turns of phrase, the overwhelming truth for Sebald is impermanence and destruction: “Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create.” An entirely entrapping work that is at once as difficult as it is rewarding.
