Sebald is producing something hybrid and fluid that is at once essay, novel, memoir, and biography. I say "he": if the metonymic, associative structure of a walking tour (the German edition was subtitled "An English Pilgrimage") is one of this book's conceits, then another, as in The Emigrants, is that this narrator and the author are the same man. Now, in The Rings of Saturn, he turns to England, where he has lived for over twenty-five years, to record the devastations he sees as he walks around the eastern coast of that country, and to take stock of his own despair. Sebald's books translated into English, he presented four discrete portraits of men exiled from Germany, which composed an extraordinary document about the lethal quality of historical amnesia and the intricacies of German and Jewish identification and dis-identification. How to fathom the human propensity for destruction? And how to write in the face of it? In The Emigrants, the first of W.G.
1998 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. MLA style: "The Rings of Saturn." The Free Library.
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