Book Review: The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
This work is presented as a novel, but it is not really a novel in the conventional sense. The plot is very thin. The narrator takes a walking tour of Suffolk, a county in eastern England. He describes what he observes on the way and also tells about historical events called to mind by his observations. In The New York Times in 1998, Roberta Silman called it “a hybrid of a book – fiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir.” Others would refer to it as autofiction, or autobiographical fiction, that is, the telling of true life events combined with scenarios culled from the imagination. As I read The Rings of Saturn I was reminded of the so-called novels of Henry Miller such as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn; Miller, too, often takes off from his immediate narrative and delves into detailed descriptions of the lives of his characters and into surrealistic meanderings – although it must be emphasized that Miller is sexually raunchy to the extreme, while Sebald avoids any mention of overt sexuality.
Sebald’s book is unusual in other ways as well. For instance, illustrations in the form of photographs, maps, and hand-written letters and notes are scattered throughout; in my edition, at least, these are of very poor quality. Some of his sentences are very long – up to half a page or even more, and his paragraphs are immense. The paragraphs often go on for numerous pages as Sebald deftly leaps from one thought to another without pause. Some chapters of fifteen to twenty pages only have two or three paragraphs in them. Miller often included long, long paragraphs in his autobiographical novels too, but the difference is that he would break them up by interspersing shorter paragraphs and lines of dialog. When Sebald uses dialog, though, he uses no quotation marks and embeds it within the lengthy paragraphs in his narrative, which can get quite confusing sometimes.
Yes, this is an unusual book. In a publishing industry that is heavily caught up in strictly labeling books according to narrative forms, genres, and so on, it is an anomaly. It is unorthodox and unconventional; it breaks the rules. I like this. Its existence demonstrates that writers can do whatever they damn well please as long as they do it well.
As for the story, such as it is, the unnamed narrator wanders along the coast of Suffolk, taking little-used footpaths and staying at inns and hotels. The overall mood is that of deterioration and desolation. He lingers at various run-down manors along the way and tells the (usually tragic) stories of their owners. He also diverges into lengthy narratives about the 17th century English writer Thomas Browne and his witnessing the dissection of a human corpse, the physiology and life cycles of herrings, the life story of the writer Joseph Conrad, the British assault on China in the 19th century, the reign of the oppressive Chinese Dowager Empress in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and other seemingly unrelated subjects that spring like luxuriant plants from his ruminations as he meanders about the countryside.
As I said, if you are looking for a conventional novel, then you’ve come to the wrong place. However, if you enjoy deviations from the usual literary norms, if you are content to wander hither and thither following the thoughts of an idiosyncratic author, and if you value artistically composed albeit loosely structured prose, then this might be a good book for you.
