The Rings of Saturn

Tomorrow is the first death anniversary of W G Sebald. On behalf of his adoring readers I wish to pay homage to this astonishing writer whose sublime novels are the noblest artefacts of the literary conscience of our times and a gift to humanity. Sebald has left us the true literary masterpieces of the 1990s and the inaugural texts of tomorrow's fiction. A postmodern-existentialist, Sebald channeld a deep drift of pensive introspection into pathbreaking narratives of elegiac wisdom and enchanting beauty that explain who we are in time,history and the cosmos. An account of a walking tour of Suffolk undertaken in 1992,The Rings of Saturn dizzly spirals beyond walking the ephemeral earth where "it takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes" into a celestial contemplation that soars to include everything and exclude nothing and reach a heaven of "a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and there will be no more grief or pain, or weeping and wailing." As he travels through the Suffolk countryside, Sebald unifies numberless people, places and events that are normally scattered in time and space into the ulitimate epiphany of the eternity of a moment and the infinity of a place that comes streaming into his consciousness in a narrative annunciation like " the rays of the sun...that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence." While "it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day," it is an imponderable enigma that our hopeless ephemerality allows us companionship in consciousness with countless centuries. Befitting a novel about the mystery of Oneness, Sebald's title is mystically grand and suggests that the writing of his novel is not different from the occurrence of the rings of Saturn. Can we walk in eternity? Can we walk to eternity. Sebald has.

Rings of Saturn was my introduction to Sebald, a marvelously evocative writer. His penetrating prose reveals so many layers of the English countryside. Sebald looks through the tarnished lens of history to a past most people would prefer not to see. In this case, a slowly decaying England whose imperial past has come back to haunt it. He tells each tale like an individual case study, loosely built around Thomas Browne's "Journal of Medical Biography." Sebald makes many salient observations. I particularly liked his study of Roger Casement, his contact with Joseph Conrad, his various peregrinations and ultimate trial for sedition, as a result of his support of the Irish freedom movement. Within this chapter, Sebald condenses Casement's tortuous history to its essential elements. Sebald noted with irony that Casement's hidden homosexuality may have been what sensitized him to the continuing oppression and exploitation that cuts across social and racial boundaries of those who lie the furthest away from the centres of power.This is a thought-provoking journey, reminiscent of other solitary travellers such as Rousseau and Proust, looking into the darker reaches of mankind. There is an essential humanity to all his stories. Each meticulously researched, distilled, and presented in this evocative collection of personal observations.

The 17th century philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne, spoke of an "Eternal Present," in which one could move through space and time and interconnect all things with...all things. In this brilliant book, the late W.G. Sebald has accomplished what Browne could only write about. He has obliterated time and distance and caused "memory" to live in the present, rather than the past, tense, and he has done so in a spectacularly successful manner.Outwardly, Sebald takes us on a walking tour of East Anglia (County Suffolk), but in reality he is leading us on a journey through time and memory in which one thing inexorably leads to another and yet another and yet another. For example, a simple ride on a miniture railway train built for the Emperor of China leads Sebald to think about dragons, which leads him to think about the Taiping mass suicide of 1864. That, in turn, leads the author to thoughts of the cruel and evil dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, an empress who poisoned her nephew, Kuang Hsu, in a slow and terrible manner. A not-so-lovely Rembrandt painting, "Anatomy Lesson," causes Sebald to think about 17th century Dutch customs; the mass executions in the Balkans lead to thoughts of Kurt Waldheim. There are many, many more fascinating juxtapositions and comparisons.Sebald begins each chapter with a personal memoir, then begins to expand and connect, erasing the barriers of time and distance and causing us to question what is fact and what is fiction. After all, we would not put it past the inventive Sebald to create much of what he is relating himself. However, it really doesn't matter what is historically true and what is not. In this book, the question is not, "What?" but "Why?" Why did Edward FitzGerald translate nothing but "The Rubiyat?" How did Chateaubriand manage to keep living after falling so deeply and madly and passionately in love with Charlotte Ives? In this book, ghosts inhabit time and space side by side with the living; the world of memory becomes as real and tangible as the world just outside our door.Interestingly, each chapter contains musings regarding silk. In the first chapter, we learn that Sir Thomas Browne's father was a silk merchant; in the last chapter Sebald's musings are of the habits of the silkworm and the culture of silk, itself. For Browne, Sebald tells us in Chapter One, silk was a metaphor of the "indestructability of the human soul." I found that Sebald's preoccupation with silk also provided a wonderful metaphor for this book, a book which is spun and enlarged much like a silkworm spins her web, entangling the reader with the writer. The central metaphor of "The Rings of Saturn," however, is one of burning, something that continually brings our memory back to the Holocaust.If you've read "The Emigrants," you'll find this book more accessible and more expansive, but also more haunting and, in a sense, strangely odd. In "The Emigrants," time was compressed; in "The Rings of Saturn," time is expanded into a

Sebald's book is full of destruction and loss, yet hope radiates from the objects that remain. The author is deeply curious and impressively educated, which allows him to see cycles of life and death in cities, buildings, artifacts, and engravings. A marvelous storyteller, he weaves fantastic yarns so full of digressions that the reader seems to be dreaming. "I'll just push to the end of the chapter," I would think, but when I reached it, the pattern of each story was so plain, the sense of distance so sharp that my head was clear, my mind refreshed. I'd be left with a few strands of meaning that would serve as the warp for the woof of the next chapter. I was never sure where Sebald was going on his ramble through Suffolk - it was almost like accompanying a somnambulist - but in the end I had entered his dream and luminous ghosts paraded before me, full of light and forgiveness. Leaving the spell of his book, I looked at the old, familiar world with new horror and wonder, a stranger on a new planet with my first inkling of the real story.

Too much, I think, has been made of the hybrid nature of this lovely, chilling book. All true works of art defy categorization; this is a work of art; enough said. What strikes me as near miraculous when reading Mr. Sebald's book is the unbelievably fine prose it is built out of. Great credit in this regard must of course be given to Michael Hulse for his translation -- one has a sense akin to that experienced when reading Kerrigan's translation of Borges, that it was originally written in English. However, it is my suspicion that Sebald's deeply classical line would render itself with incontrovertible authority into almost any language. Reading this work I get the same feeling I get when I am looking at a Poussin or a Cezanne -- that I am involved with something so clearly and precisely built that (despite Sebald's injunction that all is combustion) it will defy any and all attempts at its destruction. I have read nothing recently that can compare.