The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

 

I'll keep this short, as W. G. Sebald is hardly "obscure", having been on the thinking person's radar ever since he was praised by Susan Sontag in a 2000 essay entitled (what else?) "On W. G. Sebald". I haven't taken the trouble to go back and reread Sontag's essay to see what she found so illuminating about his works, but I'm sure the praise was deserved. In reading The Rings of Saturn over a few nights, I came to appreciate the slow, discursive tone of this fiction, which describes a walker's memories and experiences whilst sauntering in the North (or German, per Sebald) Sea vicinity of Norwich, as well as the opposite shore of the Netherlands.

Similarly to Borges, whom he openly admires, one can't vouch for the veracity of the facts as presented by the narrator; of course, there is a basis in reality, but one can't be sure where the narratives presented transition into fancy. Sebald discourses on a number of topics, beginning and ending with Sir Thomas Browne, with reflections on Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", Edward FitzGerald, the silkworm moth, Joseph Conrad, Chateaubriand, China's Dowager Empress, and the isolated and eccentric personages he encounters in his rambles. What is most apparent is the stasis of many of those whom he encounters and the bleak landscapes which they occupy, or, in the instances of Conrad and Chateaubriand, an escape from stasis only to find the sorrows and ugliness of the world awaiting them.  One comes to sense a deeper unity in the narrative, which at a glance seem to be a series of discrete essays on diverse topics; the whole is, of course, more complex than its parts. Towards the end, the author reveals the unifying element - "...our history, which is but a long account of calamities...".

With appropriate ambiguity, W. G. Sebald died in Norwich in 2001, of either a heart attack or an automobile accident.