The Rings of Saturn

ISBN 9780099448921 moved to newer alternate cover edition.

In August 1992, W.G. Sebald set off on a walking tour of Suffolk, one of England’s least populated and most striking counties. A long project–presumably The Emigrants, his great anatomy of exile, loss and identity–had left him spent. Initially his tour was a carefree one. Soon, however, Sebald was to happen upon “traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past”, in a series of encounters so intense that a year later he found himself in a state of collapse in a Norwich hospital.

The Rings of Saturn is his record of these travels, a phantasmagoria of fragments and memories, fraught with dizzying knowledge and desperation and shadowed by mortality. As in The Emigrants, past and present intermingle: the living come to seem like supernatural apparitions while the dead are vividly present. Exemplary sufferers such as Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement people the author’s solitude along with various eccentrics and even an occasional friend. Indeed, one of the most moving chapters concerns his fellow German exile–the writer Michael Hamburger.