The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. SebaldMatthew Roberson
W. G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New Directions, 1998. 296 pp. $23.95.
The narrator of The Rings of Saturn (who both is and is not W. G. Sebald in this combination of fiction, travel writing, historical study, and memoir) makes clear again and again his fascination with the life and work of Thomas Browne. He admires, in particular, Browne’s “Musaeum Clausum,” a “catalogue of remarkable books . . . listing pictures, antiquities and sundry singular items.” What distinguishes this catalogue for the narrator, in addition to its eclectic scope, is that, like another of his favorite texts, Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, it deals with “our attempts to invent secondary or tertiary worlds”; the items in Browne’s text “may have formed part of a collection put together by Browne but were more likely products of his imagination, the inventory of a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letters on the page.” In turn, Sebald’s book is a similar treasure house of items. As well as being the narrator’s account of a walking tour through England’s East Anglia, it is a map of the author’s brilliantly wandering mind, which throughout the book takes flight in various ways: into biographical sketches of the famous, the eccentric, and the forgotten; into remembrances of momentous events and places disappearing now from our world(s) and minds; and into critical analyses of artworks, treasured and fringe, as well as the possible compulsions of their creators. Binding these disparate subjects, as they commingle through past and present, are Sebald’s haunting meditations on the human desire for transcendence and the limitations of the earth, the relationships between human systems and natural patterns, the frightening immediacies of and possibilities in change, and the nebulous line separating life and death. The Rings of Saturn is strikingly intelligent. It is beautifully written and utterly captivating. [Matthew Roberson]