The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

 

With the possible exception of László Krasznahorkai, there is no writer of recent times who is as ambitious, as original, as brilliant as W.G Sebald. I knew this when I read the first of his books to be translated into English, The Emigrants, and moving through the rest of his oeuvre only convinces me further that this is the case.

The Rings of Saturn is a travel book: Sebald/not Sebald takes a long walk through Sussex. Unlike lesser examples of the genre, though, there are no "hilarious" encounters with locals or with other travelers. Instead we get reflections on history, on literature, and on landscape, rendered in such a way that they are at once somber, dreamlike, allusive, horrifying (and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny). The walker, in the course of his English stroll, calls up Thomas Browne ("Hydriotaphia, urn burial; with an account of some urns found at Brampton in Norfolk") and Edward FitzGerald (translator of Omar Khayyam), and visits his friend Michael Hamburger, who wrote elsewhere that Sebald "nail(ed) literature on to a home-made fog—or perhaps a 19th-century ready-made fog." Surely he meant this as a criticism, but the fog that drifts, in Sebald, over the destruction of the environment, the horrors committed by Belgium in the Congo, and the decrepitude of English coastal towns, is a fog that envelops sadness in wonder.

Fortunately, Sebald's work has continued to be appear into English even after his death, age 57, in an auto accident after he had a heart attack while driving. When one has read and reread the canonical novels, there's still more for us to enjoy.