5 - The Rings of Saturn (1995)

Summary

Moving from one subject, from one theme, from one concern, to another always requires some sleight of hand.

(Sebald on The Rings of Saturn)

The Rings of Saturn is Sebald's masterpiece and probably the most extraordinary book in recent German letters. It defies classification more than any other piece in Sebald's œuvre, as it freely crosses genres such as autobiography, biography, travelogue and meditative essay. With astounding ease, the narrative blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, art and documentary – navigating a wide-ranging literary territory across the temporalities of past, present, future. In the German original, The Rings of Saturn was subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt (An English Pilgrimage): an apt classification for the remarkable psycho-geographical journey that Sebald embarks on with his readers, traversing time and space in a search that strives less for truth than for redemption.

A melancholy perambulation across the Suffolk countryside provides the narrative framework of the book. At the outset, however, it is worth pointing out that this walk never took place as described. Rather, Sebald made various walks from summer 1992 to spring 1993 that were supposed to result in ten short essays to be published individually in a German newspaper. But as soon as he started composing the pieces, they grew into something more elaborate. More specifically, they transformed into a sophisticated reflection of Sebald's melancholic conception of a natural history of destruction: linking rural East Anglia with imperial China, the haul of herring with the Holocaust, or merging his own biography with those of other writers – Sebald uncovers hidden traces of destruction that add up to a universal history of catastrophe and reveal mankind as an aberrant species. The details related by the narrator in The Rings of Saturn largely correspond with actual facts: the narrator's time in the hospital, as well as the deaths of Sebald's colleagues Janine Dakyns and Michael Parkinson, are all true. The ‘long stint of work’ (RS 3) mentioned in the first sentence refers to The Emigrants. And the eccentric model maker Thomas Abrams – whose detailed model reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem built on a remote farm in the countryside sounds like a classic Sebaldian invention – did indeed exist.