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 Mi chael Hamburger.

"How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being or, if not oneself, then one's own precursor?" Sebald asks. "The fact that I first passed through British customs 33 years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol--none of these things are particularly strange. But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer ..."

Sebald seems most struck by those who lived or live quietly in adversity, "the shadow of annihilation" always hanging over them. The appropriately surnamed George Wyndham Le Strange, for example, remained on his vast property in increasing isolation, his life turning into a series of colourful anecdotes. He was "reputed to have been surrounded, in later years, by all manner of feathered creatures: by guinea fowl, pheasants, pigeons and quail, and various kinds of garden and song birds, strutting about him on the floor or flying around in the air. Some said that one summer Le Strange dug a cave in his garden and sat in it day and night like St. Jerome in the desert."

In Sebald's eyes, even the everyday comes to seem extraterrestrial--a vision intensified in Michael Hulse's beautiful rendition. His complex, allusive sentences are encased in several-pages-long paragraphs-- style and subject making for painful, exquisite reading. Though most often hypersensitive to human (and animal) suffering and making few concessions to obligatory cheeriness, Sebald is not without humour. At one point, paralysed by the presence of the past, he admits: "I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel." The Rings of Saturn is a challenging nocturne and the second of Sebald's four books to appear in English. - -Kerry Fried

Melancholy meanderings, 28 May 2008
I was given this book in German by a friend who I think had over-estimated my proficiency in that language. I made several failed attempts to penetrate the first chapter before I gave up and ordered "the Rings of Saturn" in English from amazon. I'm glad I did.

I still found the first chapter difficult but after a while, I switched into Sebald's train of thought and was spellbound for the rest of the book. Wandering around the largely desolate, decaying and deserted Suffolk coastline becomes a metaphor for a stream of consciousness, a meandering through the mind. Sights and places spark off connections to stories about a number of historical persons and events, which all become inter-connected in the literary web that is "The Rings of Saturn".

There are recurring themes here of the nature of time, transience and permanence, death and birth. In spite of the philosophical and learned nature of the writing, this book is never dry or dull. In reading it, I learned a lot, I thought a lot and I felt a lot. I can recommend this to anyone who yearns for writing and thought of quality away from the mainstream.

Walk into a magical Journey, 10 Jan 2004
This is a wonderful book, ostensibly a chronical of a walk along the suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Orfordness; Sebold weaves into this pedestrian tale a compendium of remarkable, human stories and tales from around the world. A life affirming book that reminds us how we each have the whole world within us.

Out of Nowhere, 02 Jan 2004
This was the first sebald book I purchased. It is like nothing I have read before or since. The fact that it has no story as such is immaterial to enjoyment of the often dream like qualities of this book. There is a narrative thread in the form of a journey through East Anglia but this is broken by tangental episodes and characters that drift in often seemingly from out of nowhere. This mixture of abstraction and convention is held together by an elegiac low key prose style which I find completely beguiling. Sebald has a way of communicating facts and historical episodes that make them seem fresh although the subject matter is often disturbing. The fact that as a book it is difficult to pin down in terms of style and type only enhances the compelling, enigmatic and ultimately uplifting qualities of this book. It is one of the few books I constantly return to especially after reading a highly rated 'bestseller' (which invariably doesn't come close in terms of written quality or content).

strange news from another star, 15 Oct 2003
'Rings of Saturn' is Sebald's greatest work. It has a finesse of description, and an ethereal prose style, that would be hampered by a strong narrative. In fact, Sebald is not terribly good at plot, as I believe 'Austerlitz' demonstrates. In 'Rings' the lives of the lonely and vanishing characters seem to drift in and out of vision, like figures in a misty landscape, without the artist trying to grasp them.

Something like attending a seance to which only the ghosts of obscure historical personages are summoned, 'Rings' is a beautifully melancholy read.

More history than fiction, 31 May 2003
If you are coming to this book from the redoubtable Austerlitz, make sure you know what you are getting. Rings of Saturn is not something I would describe as a novel, nor, as it says on the back cover, as travel writing or memoirs; and although it does brush against all of these genres, it sits most comfortably in the genre of history.
Austerlitz is one of my favourite books, but what you get in that - characterisation, emotion, opining, narrative thread - you get none of in ROS. ROS is a loose account of Sebald's journey across the east coast of England, where he lived and worked and died - and not a very inspiring area; but the way he constructs this book is with a collection of historical accounts: on the life of Joseph Conrad for example, and finds himself able to link them together, as it were, but the links are quite weak, and I don't think Sebald intended them to be particularly strong, more rambling and meditative; and the narrative is also quite weak, it goes literally nowhere, but again, I believe this was intentional, it is decidedly anti-plot. What I am unsure of is what Sebald's overall aim of this work was - it felt to me like the work he 'had to do' before he could write the masterpiece that is Austerlitz, but I wasn't entirely satisfied. I think this will be of interest if you enjoy what is called 'creative non-fiction' such as the historical works of Anthony Beevor, but there is not as much focus in this work, although there is probably a little more artistry. Sebald's style is like an aged cognac or an extended Chopin nocturne - lyrical and delectable - but not something you want all the time, and this is how I will treat this volume. His other works, like Emigrants, have more oomph, and can be better written, like Austerlitz, but this is still worth a read if you bear in mind the flaws.

WG Sebald's Austerlitz has something of the fractured narrative and wanderlust of his novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, and continues to develop their obsession with history, loss and memory--or more precisely in this case, forgetting. In the decade since the original German publication of Vertigo, Sebald has established himself as indisputably one of Europe's most interesting and lauded writers.

In 1967, the narrator bumps into a man in the salle de pas perdus of Antwerp's Central Station. Thus begins a long if intermittent acquaintance, during which he learns the life story of this stranger, retired architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. Raised as Dafydd Elias by a strict Welsh Calvinist ministry family, it is only at school that Austerlitz learns his true name--and only years later, by a series of chance encounters, that he allows himself to discover the truth of his origins, as a Czech child spirited away from his mother and out of Nazi territory on the Kindertransport. He returns to confront the childhood traumas that have made him feel that "I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life."

In this writer's hands, Austerlitz's tale of personal emotional repression becomes a metaphor for Europe's smothered past. Sebald wittily explores the tricks of time and space, unearthing Europe as an unconscious palimpsest. Delighting in lists and unfeasibly lengthy descriptions, Sebald can turn anything to poetry--even the alleged health benefits of Marienbad's Auschowitz springs become "a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms" (luckily, all his characters seem to be able to hold forth this way). Indeed, Sebald writes with such preternatural lucidity that even a harrowing account of writer's block ironically becomes a celebration of his own quite clearly unblockable virtuosity.

At heart, though, Austerlitz is a serious indictment of modern Europe's "avoidance system", its repeated patterns of personal and institutional forgetting that, even within Austerlitz's own lifetime, have contrived to obscure, ignore and render irretrievable his past and the source of his pain. And yet, despite the bleakness of that picture, the book ends with its hero--and its readers--committed to trying, at least, to remember. --Alan Stewart

Melancholy meanderings, 28 May 2008
I was given this book in German by a friend who I think had over-estimated my proficiency in that language. I made several failed attempts to penetrate the first chapter before I gave up and ordered "the Rings of Saturn" in English from amazon. I'm glad I did.

I still found the first chapter difficult but after a while, I switched into Sebald's train of thought and was spellbound for the rest of the book. Wandering around the largely desolate, decaying and deserted Suffolk coastline becomes a metaphor for a stream of consciousness, a meandering through the mind. Sights and places spark off connections to stories about a number of historical persons and events, which all become inter-connected in the literary web that is "The Rings of Saturn".

There are recurring themes here of the nature of time, transience and permanence, death and birth. In spite of the philosophical and learned nature of the writing, this book is never dry or dull. In reading it, I learned a lot, I thought a lot and I felt a lot. I can recommend this to anyone who yearns for writing and thought of quality away from the mainstream.

Walk into a magical Journey, 10 Jan 2004
This is a wonderful book, ostensibly a chronical of a walk along the suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Orfordness; Sebold weaves into this pedestrian tale a compendium of remarkable, human stories and tales from around the world. A life affirming book that reminds us how we each have the whole world within us.

Out of Nowhere, 02 Jan 2004
This was the first sebald book I purchased. It is like nothing I have read before or since. The fact that it has no story as such is immaterial to enjoyment of the often dream like qualities of this book. There is a narrative thread in the form of a journey through East Anglia but this is broken by tangental episodes and characters that drift in often seemingly from out of nowhere. This mixture of abstraction and convention is held together by an elegiac low key prose style which I find completely beguiling. Sebald has a way of communicating facts and historical episodes that make them seem fresh although the subject matter is often disturbing. The fact that as a book it is difficult to pin down in terms of style and type only enhances the compelling, enigmatic and ultimately uplifting qualities of this book. It is one of the few books I constantly return to especially after reading a highly rated 'bestseller' (which invariably doesn't come close in terms of written quality or content).

strange news from another star, 15 Oct 2003
'Rings of Saturn' is Sebald's greatest work. It has a finesse of description, and an ethereal prose style, that would be hampered by a strong narrative. In fact, Sebald is not terribly good at plot, as I believe 'Austerlitz' demonstrates. In 'Rings' the lives of the lonely and vanishing characters seem to drift in and out of vision, like figures in a misty landscape, without the artist trying to grasp them.

Something like attending a seance to which only the ghosts of obscure historical personages are summoned, 'Rings' is a beautifully melancholy read.

More history than fiction, 31 May 2003
If you are coming to this book from the redoubtable Austerlitz, make sure you know what you are getting. Rings of Saturn is not something I would describe as a novel, nor, as it says on the back cover, as travel writing or memoirs; and although it does brush against all of these genres, it sits most comfortably in the genre of history.
Austerlitz is one of my favourite books, but what you get in that - characterisation, emotion, opining, narrative thread - you get none of in ROS. ROS is a loose account of Sebald's journey across the east coast of England, where he lived and worked and died - and not a very inspiring area; but the way he constructs this book is with a collection of historical accounts: on the life of Joseph Conrad for example, and finds himself able to link them together, as it were, but the links are quite weak, and I don't think Sebald intended them to be particularly strong, more rambling and meditative; and the narrative is also quite weak, it goes literally nowhere, but again, I believe this was intentional, it is decidedly anti-plot. What I am unsure of is what Sebald's overall aim of this work was - it felt to me like the work he 'had to do' before he could write the masterpiece that is Austerlitz, but I wasn't entirely satisfied. I think this will be of interest if you enjoy what is called 'creative non-fiction' such as the historical works of Anthony Beevor, but there is not as much focus in this work, although there is probably a little more artistry. Sebald's style is like an aged cognac or an extended Chopin nocturne - lyrical and delectable - but not something you want all the time, and this is how I will treat this volume. His other works, like Emigrants, have more oomph, and can be better written, like Austerlitz, but this is still worth a read if you bear in mind the flaws.

Stupendous semi-fictional exploration of memory, experience, and the holocaust, 27 Sep 2008
An innovative, fantastic exploration of memory, experience, and how the horrors of the holocaust can ruin the life of people who weren't even directly touched by it. The mixture of autobiography and fiction, as well as the copious use of photographs to enhance the narrative, make for a very real and vivid story. More than this, the book is littered with the deepest, most interesting of insights and observations. However, there were a few flaws: all the voices (even Vera's) sounded the same to me; the Jewish angle just didn't ring true, and I think this was a marginal hole in Sebald's research; and while the relationship with and symbolism of buildings was done brilliantly, I rarely felt that these characters were brought alive through their relationships with each other, as they only ever seemed to connect via a series of distant acquaintances. Perhaps this was the point, since Austerlitz is made cold and detached because of what has been stolen from him by the Nazis, but all the other characters seemed infected by the same problem too.

Strangely Strange, 14 Mar 2008
This tackles the same kind of subject matter as Boy With the Striped Pyjamas but in a much more academic way. It is a strange book. The first 50 pages are so are rather like wading through porridge. When you eventually get to the narrative part you begin to have high hopes, that are then shot down with a disappointing middle and end section.

The book is written in just one massive paragraph - which in itself isn't a great problem, but at times you feel that Sebald is trying to be just too clever and erudite for the good of the story which is essentially about the leading character's journey to find his past - again rooted in Eastern Europe.

Sadly he finds the answers all too easily which means the book becomes more a social comment than a good mystery story. The prose is interspersed with strange black and white maps and photographs that seem to add little to it and at the end it all just peters out with a new character being introduced in the last three pages which just leaves you asking the question why?

Much of the book is rambling in nature which is sad because it does have quality and is well written but the subject matter ends up in disappointment.

Impenetrable, 29 Nov 2007
The synopsis for this book reads as just the kind of thing I enjoy. The themes of repression and memory, the war as dispossesion as a vehicle for that and a complex, untraditional narrative. These all tick boxes for me, and indeed all are present within the book. Despite that I just found this book endlessly easy to put down. I did finish it, but it was more a matter of pride than enjoyment. I found the narrative too fragmented to allow me to fully engage with the plot and the characters and because there was very little to connect me to the text I found I lost interest very easily. It should have been a good book, but for me it just wasn't.

Esoteric, atmospheric, irritating but ultimately haunting....., 23 Oct 2007
In 1939 a five year old is sent from Prague to Wales to escape the imminent disaster. He soon forgets all of his previous life and grows up knowing nothing of his past. However in adulthood he comes he is haunted by his unknown identity and by his absence of memories. The loveless Welsh household and the harsh private school are superbly described.

The book is narrated by someone who meets Austerlitz in Belgium. Their friendship continues and they meet up occasionally and Austerlitz continues to tell of the progress he has made. The writing is atmospheric and haunting - goes off into reveries on architecture, fortifications, moths, museum exhibits, maps, etc etc. I have to confess I found some of these quite irritating - and some of the vocabulary seemed deliberately esoteric.......

Austerlitz took photographs continually and the book is liberally illustrated by these. Many are very badly reproduced (deliberately?) and I am not sure how much they finally contributed to the overall narrative.

The reviews were glowing but on finishing reading it I had quite ambivalent feelings - irritation mixed with admiration. However I found that images from this book came back to haunt me days after I had finished it..... perhaps it was better than I gave it credit for!





small pleasures, 13 Sep 2007
It is unjust that some of the back-cover blurbs speak so highly of this pseudo-literature. I almost gave up after 50 pages or so; losing patience with the lack of paragraph or chapter breaks, the determined lack of plot and characterisation, and the relentlessly pedantic and impassive tone. There is a hint of purpose after about 200 pages, as the author creeps predictable towards the Holocaust, but any hope of dramatic denouement is snuffed out by a disappointing detour into another barely significant scene. The whole book is a series of hollow digressions, each with an unwarranted attention to the details of objects and artefacts. It hints at feeling but never stirs the imagination. Although his prose style is light and elegant, this is the literary equivalent of finding an old photo album in a stranger's attic: quaint, curious but distant and unmoving.

The Emigrants is a meditation on memory and loss. Sebald re-creates the lives of four exiles--five if you include his oblique self-portrait--through their own accounts, others' recollections and pictures and found objects. But he brings these men before our eyes only to make them fade away, "longing for extinction." Two were eventual suicides, another died in an asylum, the fourth still lived under a "poisonous canopy" more than 40 years after his parents' death in Nazi Germany.

Sebald's own longing is for communion. En route to Ithaca (the real upstate New York location but also the symbolic one), he comes to feel "like a travelling companion of my neighbour in the next lane." After the car speeds away--"the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window--I felt deserted and desolate for a time." Sebald's narrative is purposely moth-holed (butterfly-ridden, actually--there's a recurring Nabokov-with-a-net type), an escape from the prison-house of realism. According to the author, his Uncle Ambros's increasingly improbable tales were the result of "an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions." Luckily for us, Sebald seems to have inherited the same syndrome. --Kerry Fried

Melancholy meanderings, 28 May 2008
I was given this book in German by a friend who I think had over-estimated my proficiency in that language. I made several failed attempts to penetrate the first chapter before I gave up and ordered "the Rings of Saturn" in English from amazon. I'm glad I did.

I still found the first chapter difficult but after a while, I switched into Sebald's train of thought and was spellbound for the rest of the book. Wandering around the largely desolate, decaying and deserted Suffolk coastline becomes a metaphor for a stream of consciousness, a meandering through the mind. Sights and places spark off connections to stories about a number of historical persons and events, which all become inter-connected in the literary web that is "The Rings of Saturn".

There are recurring themes here of the nature of time, transience and permanence, death and birth. In spite of the philosophical and learned nature of the writing, this book is never dry or dull. In reading it, I learned a lot, I thought a lot and I felt a lot. I can recommend this to anyone who yearns for writing and thought of quality away from the mainstream.

Walk into a magical Journey, 10 Jan 2004
This is a wonderful book, ostensibly a chronical of a walk along the suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Orfordness; Sebold weaves into this pedestrian tale a compendium of remarkable, human stories and tales from around the world. A life affirming book that reminds us how we each have the whole world within us.

Out of Nowhere, 02 Jan 2004
This was the first sebald book I purchased. It is like nothing I have read before or since. The fact that it has no story as such is immaterial to enjoyment of the often dream like qualities of this book. There is a narrative thread in the form of a journey through East Anglia but this is broken by tangental episodes and characters that drift in often seemingly from out of nowhere. This mixture of abstraction and convention is held together by an elegiac low key prose style which I find completely beguiling. Sebald has a way of communicating facts and historical episodes that make them seem fresh although the subject matter is often disturbing. The fact that as a book it is difficult to pin down in terms of style and type only enhances the compelling, enigmatic and ultimately uplifting qualities of this book. It is one of the few books I constantly return to especially after reading a highly rated 'bestseller' (which invariably doesn't come close in terms of written quality or content).

strange news from another star, 15 Oct 2003
'Rings of Saturn' is Sebald's greatest work. It has a finesse of description, and an ethereal prose style, that would be hampered by a strong narrative. In fact, Sebald is not terribly good at plot, as I believe 'Austerlitz' demonstrates. In 'Rings' the lives of the lonely and vanishing characters seem to drift in and out of vision, like figures in a misty landscape, without the artist trying to grasp them.

Something like attending a seance to which only the ghosts of obscure historical personages are summoned, 'Rings' is a beautifully melancholy read.

More history than fiction, 31 May 2003
If you are coming to this book from the redoubtable Austerlitz, make sure you know what you are getting. Rings of Saturn is not something I would describe as a novel, nor, as it says on the back cover, as travel writing or memoirs; and although it does brush against all of these genres, it sits most comfortably in the genre of history.
Austerlitz is one of my favourite books, but what you get in that - characterisation, emotion, opining, narrative thread - you get none of in ROS. ROS is a loose account of Sebald's journey across the east coast of England, where he lived and worked and died - and not a very inspiring area; but the way he constructs this book is with a collection of historical accounts: on the life of Joseph Conrad for example, and finds himself able to link them together, as it were, but the links are quite weak, and I don't think Sebald intended them to be particularly strong, more rambling and meditative; and the narrative is also quite weak, it goes literally nowhere, but again, I believe this was intentional, it is decidedly anti-plot. What I am unsure of is what Sebald's overall aim of this work was - it felt to me like the work he 'had to do' before he could write the masterpiece that is Austerlitz, but I wasn't entirely satisfied. I think this will be of interest if you enjoy what is called 'creative non-fiction' such as the historical works of Anthony Beevor, but there is not as much focus in this work, although there is probably a little more artistry. Sebald's style is like an aged cognac or an extended Chopin nocturne - lyrical and delectable - but not something you want all the time, and this is how I will treat this volume. His other works, like Emigrants, have more oomph, and can be better written, like Austerlitz, but this is still worth a read if you bear in mind the flaws.

Stupendous semi-fictional exploration of memory, experience, and the holocaust, 27 Sep 2008
An innovative, fantastic exploration of memory, experience, and how the horrors of the holocaust can ruin the life of people who weren't even directly touched by it. The mixture of autobiography and fiction, as well as the copious use of photographs to enhance the narrative, make for a very real and vivid story. More than this, the book is littered with the deepest, most interesting of insights and observations. However, there were a few flaws: all the voices (even Vera's) sounded the same to me; the Jewish angle just didn't ring true, and I think this was a marginal hole in Sebald's research; and while the relationship with and symbolism of buildings was done brilliantly, I rarely felt that these characters were brought alive through their relationships with each other, as they only ever seemed to connect via a series of distant acquaintances. Perhaps this was the point, since Austerlitz is made cold and detached because of what has been stolen from him by the Nazis, but all the other characters seemed infected by the same problem too.

Strangely Strange, 14 Mar 2008
This tackles the same kind of subject matter as Boy With the Striped Pyjamas but in a much more academic way. It is a strange book. The first 50 pages are so are rather like wading through porridge. When you eventually get to the narrative part you begin to have high hopes, that are then shot down with a disappointing middle and end section.

The book is written in just one massive paragraph - which in itself isn't a great problem, but at times you feel that Sebald is trying to be just too clever and erudite for the good of the story which is essentially about the leading character's journey to find his past - again rooted in Eastern Europe.

Sadly he finds the answers all too easily which means the book becomes more a social comment than a good mystery story. The prose is interspersed with strange black and white maps and photographs that seem to add little to it and at the end it all just peters out with a new character being introduced in the last three pages which just leaves you asking the question why?

Much of the book is rambling in nature which is sad because it does have quality and is well written but the subject matter ends up in disappointment.

Impenetrable, 29 Nov 2007
The synopsis for this book reads as just the kind of thing I enjoy. The themes of repression and memory, the war as dispossesion as a vehicle for that and a complex, untraditional narrative. These all tick boxes for me, and indeed all are present within the book. Despite that I just found this book endlessly easy to put down. I did finish it, but it was more a matter of pride than enjoyment. I found the narrative too fragmented to allow me to fully engage with the plot and the characters and because there was very little to connect me to the text I found I lost interest very easily. It should have been a good book, but for me it just wasn't.

Esoteric, atmospheric, irritating but ultimately haunting....., 23 Oct 2007
In 1939 a five year old is sent from Prague to Wales to escape the imminent disaster. He soon forgets all of his previous life and grows up knowing nothing of his past. However in adulthood he comes he is haunted by his unknown identity and by his absence of memories. The loveless Welsh household and the harsh private school are superbly described.

The book is narrated by someone who meets Austerlitz in Belgium. Their friendship continues and they meet up occasionally and Austerlitz continues to tell of the progress he has made. The writing is atmospheric and haunting - goes off into reveries on architecture, fortifications, moths, museum exhibits, maps, etc etc. I have to confess I found some of these quite irritating - and some of the vocabulary seemed deliberately esoteric.......

Austerlitz took photographs continually and the book is liberally illustrated by these. Many are very badly reproduced (deliberately?) and I am not sure how much they finally contributed to the overall narrative.

The reviews were glowing but on finishing reading it I had quite ambivalent feelings - irritation mixed with admiration. However I found that images from this book came back to haunt me days after I had finished it..... perhaps it was better than I gave it credit for!





small pleasures, 13 Sep 2007
It is unjust that some of the back-cover blurbs speak so highly of this pseudo-literature. I almost gave up after 50 pages or so; losing patience with the lack of paragraph or chapter breaks, the determined lack of plot and characterisation, and the relentlessly pedantic and impassive tone. There is a hint of purpose after about 200 pages, as the author creeps predictable towards the Holocaust, but any hope of dramatic denouement is snuffed out by a disappointing detour into another barely significant scene. The whole book is a series of hollow digressions, each with an unwarranted attention to the details of objects and artefacts. It hints at feeling but never stirs the imagination. Although his prose style is light and elegant, this is the literary equivalent of finding an old photo album in a stranger's attic: quaint, curious but distant and unmoving.

Shadows of the past, 08 Sep 2007
Memories have a strange way of clinging to people, appearing haphazardly and intermittently. Other times they may roll over an individual with such insistence it changes the course of their life. Often the mind modifies recollections over time, suggesting altered fragments of past realities when they return. Sebald is a master of searching out lost or hidden memories. In a format that goes beyond the traditional genres, he merges memoir, biography, travelogue and fiction. In an often elegiac, yet precise language with great attention to detail, he takes the reader on a winding road of discovery. He creates patterns and builds connections out of incidents and places that initially appear disjointed. In The Emigrants he applies his unique writing style and descriptive technique to the fullest.

The book consists of four independent narratives portraying four very different individuals within their social and historical context. Yet, each of them is profoundly connected to a past that each cannot escape. The oblique references to the disturbing events of the twentieth century - the two World Wars, the Holocaust - linger like a shadow behind the characters, having deeply scarred their existence. The narrator, who in part, or entirely, could be Sebald himself, is an inquisitive researcher into his subjects' lives. In his quest to comprehend each of them, he imagines himself in their shoes, traveling through many villages, towns and countries, tracing their wanderings, probing in depth their temporary existence away from their homeland and the reasons for giving up on their lives: the doctor, the teacher, the great uncle, and the painter. Sebald is a meticulous observer of locales in nature. His own ruminations when walking along a familiar village path or through the street maze of a city add a rare quality of authenticity to the accounts. The significance of his usually gloomy black and white photos, apparently incidental, yet deliberately placed, of buildings, landscapes, objects or people, while not identified, emerges from the narrative context and strengthens it.

With each portrait Sebald builds a more complex character study. He expands his understanding of the subject beyond his personal recollections by interviewing intermediaries, such as family and friends and sifting through their documents and photos. In an overall sense, the protagonists are characters of fiction. However, they are drawn from and shaped to a greater or lesser extend by Sebald's memory of people he knew. For example, his elementary school teacher was the basis for Paul who, as part Jewish, was prevented from teaching during the thirties and left the country only to return after the war and to end up in the village of Sebald's childhood. The most direct connection between the narrator and his subject is established in the portrait of Max Ferber, who also resembles Sebald contemporary, the painter Frank Auerbach. In conversations and joint walks through Manchester, where Sebald lived for a time, the reader can sense that his narrator might well reflects many of the author's thoughts and preoccupations at the time.

All four individuals were ordinary people formed by extraordinary circumstances. A feeling of nostalgia for a simpler and happier time permeates the stories as Sebald's narrator reminisces over diaries and photos from his subjects' collections. The reader, almost despite themselves, are drawn into these personal portraits and also the reflections on time, loss and memory as a result of the turmoil of the twentieth century. [Friederike Knabe]


A moving book, 06 Feb 2004
“The Emigrants” firs appear to be mere accounts of four different Jewish emigrants in the twentieth century. But gradually the four narratives merge into a poetic evocation of exile and loss. Mr Sebald’s precise, almost dreamlike writing – along with many beautiful photographs – works its magic. The account of the displacement of these four émigrés is both sober and delicate. Few books convey more about that complex and tragic fate. Michael Hulse’s exquisite translation really makes this book a work of art.

Separation anxiety, 04 Jul 2002
The melancholy of separation 24 June, 2002
"The Emigrants" presents itself as an anthology of four biographies, of a doctor, a teacher, a valet and a painter. But it is in fact a single narrative because all four emigrants have undergone the same story and because each successive biography takes the tale a little further back towards the subject's childhood.

The tale is of middle-Europeans who were forced to leave home during the first half of the 20th century. And in leaving home they lost their identities, their sense of belonging and their sense of self. They became, in the modern jargon, emotional cripples; bereaved, but bereaved of their own roots, not only of other people. All four were Jewish, but that is incidental to the narrative of loss and is never mentioned explicitly.

"The Emigrants" is written in Sebald's characteristic cool, measured, spoken prose. Ishiguro is another practitioner of this art, so maybe it can be called the University of East Anglia style. Sebald strikes the facts clearly so they can resonate. The book reads itself easily because it is simple and about real people. The story of the valet who willed himself to die under electroconvulsive therapy made me cry.

What is not there Sebald does not replace with speculation or embroidered adjectives. So the foursome's memories fade into the past like Sebald's smudged black-and-white photos.

The melancholy of separation, 24 Jun 2002
"The Emigrants" presents itself as an anthology of four biographies, of a doctor, a teacher, a valet and a painter. But it is in fact a single narrative because all four emigrants have undergone the same story and because each successive biography takes the tale a little further back towards the subject's childhood.

The tale is of middle-Europeans who were forced to leave home during the first half of the 20th century. And in leaving home they lost their identities, their sense of belonging and their sense of self. They became, in the modern jargon, emotional cripples; bereaved, but bereaved of their own roots, not only of other people. All four were Jewish, but that is incidental to the narrative of loss and is never mentioned explicitly.

"The Emigrants" is written in Sebald's characteristic cool, measured, spoken prose. Ishiguro is another practitioner of this art, so maybe it can be called the University of East Anglia style. Sebald strikes the facts clearly so they can resonate. The book reads itself easily because it is simple and about real people. The story of the valet who willed himself to die under electroconvulsive therapy made me cry.

What is not there Sebald does not replace with speculation or embroidered adjectives. So the foursome's memories fade into the past like Sebald's smudged black-and-white photos.

Gentle and evocative, 09 Apr 2002
Sebald writes movingly of four different emigrants and ties together their sense of loss and displacement. There are common threads in each story but each life is clearly drawn and it's effect upon Sebald's own life and emotions alluded to rather than stated explicitly.
There is a real sense of place in each story & I especially enjoyed the description of Manchester in the 60's, reminding me of a world I used to know that has now passed.
I'm only sorry that there will be no more from this spare and elegant writer.

It is not often that books receive the universal critical acclaim with which W.G. Sebald's work in English translation has been met. The Rings of Saturn, in particular, achieved the sort of plaudits which would enable most writers to die happy. Sebald's limpid prose is literally entrancing and has encouraged a serious, passionate and aesthetic response. His unique style was first employed in Vertigo, published in the original German in 1990 and now available in English. As in The Emigrants, Vertigo interweaves four narratives that develop an elegiac evocation of a transcendent theme--which, in this case, is that of memory. Beginning with Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal), and his painful and unreliable recollections of the military campaign during which his rites of passage were won, the narrative elegantly traverses Sebald's own voyages through Italy. It journeys into the intersection of temporal and personal perspectives which is the stuff of all interpretations, both past and present.

As the book develops, it returns to the same locations: Milan, Verona, Venice and the Alps. In the course of this fractured meandering, the reader lives with a haunted Franz Kafka and admires the serene beauty of the stars above Lake Garda, before returning to Sebald's home in the Bavarian Alps ,where the author confronts his childhood memories.

Of all Sebald's works, his narrative style is perhaps best suited to the subject-matter of this book, for it is precisely the distorted and unfathomable essence of memory that his stumbling journey seeks to unravel. Thus in Vertigo, Sebald's integration of personal, historical and fictional perspectives, combined with the nature of his physical exploration, creates a vivid and lasting impression of the imaginative confusion that is inherent in any thought, recollection or projection. This style of writing requires deep integrity and it is impossible not to develop a picture of a deeply sensitive mind, which is aware of the very nature of its conceits and deceptions. "What is it that undoes a writer?", asks Sebald, when thinking of Stendhal. The question weighs over the rest of the book and indeed over much of Sebald's work.

In The Rings of Saturn he goes some way towards producing an answer, not just to this but indeed to the motivation of Vertigo as a whole:

"The fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight."

--Toby Green

Melancholy meanderings, 28 May 2008
I was given this book in German by a friend who I think had over-estimated my proficiency in that language. I made several failed attempts to penetrate the first chapter before I gave up and ordered "the Rings of Saturn" in English from amazon. I'm glad I did.

I still found the first chapter difficult but after a while, I switched into Sebald's train of thought and was spellbound for the rest of the book. Wandering around the largely desolate, decaying and deserted Suffolk coastline becomes a metaphor for a stream of consciousness, a meandering through the mind. Sights and places spark off connections to stories about a number of historical persons and events, which all become inter-connected in the literary web that is "The Rings of Saturn".

There are recurring themes here of the nature of time, transience and permanence, death and birth. In spite of the philosophical and learned nature of the writing, this book is never dry or dull. In reading it, I learned a lot, I thought a lot and I felt a lot. I can recommend this to anyone who yearns for writing and thought of quality away from the mainstream.

Walk into a magical Journey, 10 Jan 2004
This is a wonderful book, ostensibly a chronical of a walk along the suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Orfordness; Sebold weaves into this pedestrian tale a compendium of remarkable, human stories and tales from around the world. A life affirming book that reminds us how we each have the whole world within us.

Out of Nowhere, 02 Jan 2004
This was the first sebald book I purchased. It is like nothing I have read before or since. The fact that it has no story as such is immaterial to enjoyment of the often dream like qualities of this book. There is a narrative thread in the form of a journey through East Anglia but this is broken by tangental episodes and characters that drift in often seemingly from out of nowhere. This mixture of abstraction and convention is held together by an elegiac low key prose style which I find completely beguiling. Sebald has a way of communicating facts and historical episodes that make them seem fresh although the subject matter is often disturbing. The fact that as a book it is difficult to pin down in terms of style and type only enhances the compelling, enigmatic and ultimately uplifting qualities of this book. It is one of the few books I constantly return to especially after reading a highly rated 'bestseller' (which invariably doesn't come close in terms of written quality or content).

strange news from another star, 15 Oct 2003
'Rings of Saturn' is Sebald's greatest work. It has a finesse of description, and an ethereal prose style, that would be hampered by a strong narrative. In fact, Sebald is not terribly good at plot, as I believe 'Austerlitz' demonstrates. In 'Rings' the lives of the lonely and vanishing characters seem to drift in and out of vision, like figures in a misty landscape, without the artist trying to grasp them.

Something like attending a seance to which only the ghosts of obscure historical personages are summoned, 'Rings' is a beautifully melancholy read.

More history than fiction, 31 May 2003
If you are coming to this book from the redoubtable Austerlitz, make sure you know what you are getting. Rings of Saturn is not something I would describe as a novel, nor, as it says on the back cover, as travel writing or memoirs; and although it does brush against all of these genres, it sits most comfortably in the genre of history.
Austerlitz is one of my favourite books, but what you get in that - characterisation, emotion, opining, narrative thread - you get none of in ROS. ROS is a loose account of Sebald's journey across the east coast of England, where he lived and worked and died - and not a very inspiring area; but the way he constructs this book is with a collection of historical accounts: on the life of Joseph Conrad for example, and finds himself able to link them together, as it were, but the links are quite weak, and I don't think Sebald intended them to be particularly strong, more rambling and meditative; and the narrative is also quite weak, it goes literally nowhere, but again, I believe this was intentional, it is decidedly anti-plot. What I am unsure of is what Sebald's overall aim of this work was - it felt to me like the work he 'had to do' before he could write the masterpiece that is Austerlitz, but I wasn't entirely satisfied. I think this will be of interest if you enjoy what is called 'creative non-fiction' such as the historical works of Anthony Beevor, but there is not as much focus in this work, although there is probably a little more artistry. Sebald's style is like an aged cognac or an extended Chopin nocturne - lyrical and delectable - but not something you want all the time, and this is how I will treat this volume. His other works, like Emigrants, have more oomph, and can be better written, like Austerlitz, but this is still worth a read if you bear in mind the flaws.

Stupendous semi-fictional exploration of memory, experience, and the holocaust, 27 Sep 2008
An innovative, fantastic exploration of memory, experience, and how the horrors of the holocaust can ruin the life of people who weren't even directly touched by it. The mixture of autobiography and fiction, as well as the copious use of photographs to enhance the narrative, make for a very real and vivid story. More than this, the book is littered with the deepest, most interesting of insights and observations. However, there were a few flaws: all the voices (even Vera's) sounded the same to me; the Jewish angle just didn't ring true, and I think this was a marginal hole in Sebald's research; and while the relationship with and symbolism of buildings was done brilliantly, I rarely felt that these characters were brought alive through their relationships with each other, as they only ever seemed to connect via a series of distant acquaintances. Perhaps this was the point, since Austerlitz is made cold and detached because of what has been stolen from him by the Nazis, but all the other characters seemed infected by the same problem too.

Strangely Strange, 14 Mar 2008
This tackles the same kind of subject matter as Boy With the Striped Pyjamas but in a much more academic way. It is a strange book. The first 50 pages are so are rather like wading through porridge. When you eventually get to the narrative part you begin to have high hopes, that are then shot down with a disappointing middle and end section.

The book is written in just one massive paragraph - which in itself isn't a great problem, but at times you feel that Sebald is trying to be just too clever and erudite for the good of the story which is essentially about the leading character's journey to find his past - again rooted in Eastern Europe.

Sadly he finds the answers all too easily which means the book becomes more a social comment than a good mystery story. The prose is interspersed with strange black and white maps and photographs that seem to add little to it and at the end it all just peters out with a new character being introduced in the last three pages which just leaves you asking the question why?

Much of the book is rambling in nature which is sad because it does have quality and is well written but the subject matter ends up in disappointment.

Impenetrable, 29 Nov 2007
The synopsis for this book reads as just the kind of thing I enjoy. The themes of repression and memory, the war as dispossesion as a vehicle for that and a complex, untraditional narrative. These all tick boxes for me, and indeed all are present within the book. Despite that I just found this book endlessly easy to put down. I did finish it, but it was more a matter of pride than enjoyment. I found the narrative too fragmented to allow me to fully engage with the plot and the characters and because there was very little to connect me to the text I found I lost interest very easily. It should have been a good book, but for me it just wasn't.

Esoteric, atmospheric, irritating but ultimately haunting....., 23 Oct 2007
In 1939 a five year old is sent from Prague to Wales to escape the imminent disaster. He soon forgets all of his previous life and grows up knowing nothing of his past. However in adulthood he comes he is haunted by his unknown identity and by his absence of memories. The loveless Welsh household and the harsh private school are superbly described.

The book is narrated by someone who meets Austerlitz in Belgium. Their friendship continues and they meet up occasionally and Austerlitz continues to tell of the progress he has made. The writing is atmospheric and haunting - goes off into reveries on architecture, fortifications, moths, museum exhibits, maps, etc etc. I have to confess I found some of these quite irritating - and some of the vocabulary seemed deliberately esoteric.......

Austerlitz took photographs continually and the book is liberally illustrated by these. Many are very badly reproduced (deliberately?) and I am not sure how much they finally contributed to the overall narrative.

The reviews were glowing but on finishing reading it I had quite ambivalent feelings - irritation mixed with admiration. However I found that images from this book came back to haunt me days after I had finished it..... perhaps it was better than I gave it credit for!





small pleasures, 13 Sep 2007
It is unjust that some of the back-cover blurbs speak so highly of this pseudo-literature. I almost gave up after 50 pages or so; losing patience with the lack of paragraph or chapter breaks, the determined lack of plot and characterisation, and the relentlessly pedantic and impassive tone. There is a hint of purpose after about 200 pages, as the author creeps predictable towards the Holocaust, but any hope of dramatic denouement is snuffed out by a disappointing detour into another barely significant scene. The whole book is a series of hollow digressions, each with an unwarranted attention to the details of objects and artefacts. It hints at feeling but never stirs the imagination. Although his prose style is light and elegant, this is the literary equivalent of finding an old photo album in a stranger's attic: quaint, curious but distant and unmoving.

Shadows of the past, 08 Sep 2007
Memories have a strange way of clinging to people, appearing haphazardly and intermittently. Other times they may roll over an individual with such insistence it changes the course of their life. Often the mind modifies recollections over time, suggesting altered fragments of past realities when they return. Sebald is a master of searching out lost or hidden memories. In a format that goes beyond the traditional genres, he merges memoir, biography, travelogue and fiction. In an often elegiac, yet precise language with great attention to detail, he takes the reader on a winding road of discovery. He creates patterns and builds connections out of incidents and places that initially appear disjointed. In The Emigrants he applies his unique writing style and descriptive technique to the fullest.

The book consists of four independent narratives portraying four very different individuals within their social and historical context. Yet, each of them is profoundly connected to a past that each cannot escape. The oblique references to the disturbing events of the twentieth century - the two World Wars, the Holocaust - linger like a shadow behind the characters, having deeply scarred their existence. The narrator, who in part, or entirely, could be Sebald himself, is an inquisitive researcher into his subjects' lives. In his quest to comprehend each of them, he imagines himself in their shoes, traveling through many villages, towns and countries, tracing their wanderings, probing in depth their temporary existence away from their homeland and the reasons for giving up on their lives: the doctor, the teacher, the great uncle, and the painter. Sebald is a meticulous observer of locales in nature. His own ruminations when walking along a familiar village path or through the street maze of a city add a rare quality of authenticity to the accounts. The significance of his usually gloomy black and white photos, apparently incidental, yet deliberately placed, of buildings, landscapes, objects or people, while not identified, emerges from the narrative context and strengthens it.

With each portrait Sebald builds a more complex character study. He expands his understanding of the subject beyond his personal recollections by interviewing intermediaries, such as family and friends and sifting through their documents and photos. In an overall sense, the protagonists are characters of fiction. However, they are drawn from and shaped to a greater or lesser extend by Sebald's memory of people he knew. For example, his elementary school teacher was the basis for Paul who, as part Jewish, was prevented from teaching during the thirties and left the country only to return after the war and to end up in the village of Sebald's childhood. The most direct connection between the narrator and his subject is established in the portrait of Max Ferber, who also resembles Sebald contemporary, the painter Frank Auerbach. In conversations and joint walks through Manchester, where Sebald lived for a time, the reader can sense that his narrator might well reflects many of the author's thoughts and preoccupations at the time.

All four individuals were ordinary people formed by extraordinary circumstances. A feeling of nostalgia for a simpler and happier time permeates the stories as Sebald's narrator reminisces over diaries and photos from his subjects' collections. The reader, almost despite themselves, are drawn into these personal portraits and also the reflections on time, loss and memory as a result of the turmoil of the twentieth century. [Friederike Knabe]


A moving book, 06 Feb 2004
“The Emigrants” firs appear to be mere accounts of four different Jewish emigrants in the twentieth century. But gradually the four narratives merge into a poetic evocation of exile and loss. Mr Sebald’s precise, almost dreamlike writing – along with many beautiful photographs – works its magic. The account of the displacement of these four émigrés is both sober and delicate. Few books convey more about that complex and tragic fate. Michael Hulse’s exquisite translation really makes this book a work of art.

Separation anxiety, 04 Jul 2002
The melancholy of separation 24 June, 2002
"The Emigrants" presents itself as an anthology of four biographies, of a doctor, a teacher, a valet and a painter. But it is in fact a single narrative because all four emigrants have undergone the same story and because each successive biography takes the tale a little further back towards the subject's childhood.

The tale is of middle-Europeans who were forced to leave home during the first half of the 20th century. And in leaving home they lost their identities, their sense of belonging and their sense of self. They became, in the modern jargon, emotional cripples; bereaved, but bereaved of their own roots, not only of other people. All four were Jewish, but that is incidental to the narrative of loss and is never mentioned explicitly.

"The Emigrants" is written in Sebald's characteristic cool, measured, spoken prose. Ishiguro is another practitioner of this art, so maybe it can be called the University of East Anglia style. Sebald strikes the facts clearly so they can resonate. The book reads itself easily because it is simple and about real people. The story of the valet who willed himself to die under electroconvulsive therapy made me cry.

What is not there Sebald does not replace with speculation or embroidered adjectives. So the foursome's memories fade into the past like Sebald's smudged black-and-white photos.

The melancholy of separation, 24 Jun 2002
"The Emigrants" presents itself as an anthology of four biographies, of a doctor, a teacher, a valet and a painter. But it is in fact a single narrative because all four emigrants have undergone the same story and because each successive biography takes the tale a little further back towards the subject's childhood.

The tale is of middle-Europeans who were forced to leave home during the first half of the 20th century. And in leaving home they lost their identities, their sense of belonging and their sense of self. They became, in the modern jargon, emotional cripples; bereaved, but bereaved of their own roots, not only of other people. All four were Jewish, but that is incidental to the narrative of loss and is never mentioned explicitly.

"The Emigrants" is written in Sebald's characteristic cool, measured, spoken prose. Ishiguro is another practitioner of this art, so maybe it can be called the University of East Anglia style. Sebald strikes the facts clearly so they can resonate. The book reads itself easily because it is simple and about real people. The story of the valet who willed himself to die under electroconvulsive therapy made me cry.

What is not there Sebald does not replace with speculation or embroidered adjectives. So the foursome's memories fade into the past like Sebald's smudged black-and-white photos.

Gentle and evocative, 09 Apr 2002
Sebald writes movingly of four different emigrants and ties together their sense of loss and displacement. There are common threads in each story but each life is clearly drawn and it's effect upon Sebald's own life and emotions alluded to rather than stated explicitly.
There is a real sense of place in each story & I especially enjoyed the description of Manchester in the 60's, reminding me of a world I used to know that has now passed.
I'm only sorry that there will be no more from this spare and elegant writer.

A haunting, strange and totally original physical and metaph, 20 Dec 2000
'Vertigo' is well titled. There is a constant feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty in the narrative. There is suspense, but the narrator's combination of ultrasensivity and naivety is often comic. In the main section, 'All'estero', Sebald retraces Kafka's journey to the Italian Lakes in 1913. On a local bus, he sees twin boys who look exactly like Kafka. (It should be noted that Sebald is given to imagining present-day people to be historical figures.) He tries to explain his excitement at this coincidence to the boys' parents and asks them to send him a photo of the boys to his address in England. The boys gigle and the parents frown. Belatedly, Sebald realises that the parents think he is a pederast and hurriedly gets off at the next stop. Or in Verona where he eats alone in a dreadful pizzeria and is suddenly overcome with terror when he sees from the bill that the propietor is Sr Cadavero. At this point Sebald overhears him telling someone on the phone that 'hell is at the gates'. He flees. There is something of Kafka in these incidents. But M. Hulot is not far away either. In the last section of the book, Sebald describes his return to W., his home village in the Allgau,just across the border from Tyrol. Present experiences mingle with childhood memories. People, places, and incidents are unerringly recalled and placed. The mood here is dark, the season winter, and the lonely wanderer of Schubert's 'Winterreise' also comes to mind. The richness of allusion is typical of Sebald's work. The writing is clear, readable, and totally compelling. It's impossible to sum up Sebald's work - he's too much of an original for that - but his is a voice which is worth attending to.

Don't look down, 29 Sep 2000
W G Sebald isn't the most cheery author around. His later work, The Rings Of Saturn, was a somewhat gloomy jaunt around Suffolk (an area of England not known for its Barbados-like jollity). This collection does not disappoint. Sebald (or his alter-ego, at any rate), travels here and there, and doesn't seem to find joy in any place he goes to. Italian restaurants, his home town, nowhere is safe - he's a kind of anti-Bill Bryson. But all the time, his muses on existence are beautifully written and are genuinely thought provoking. He has a wonderful tone (helped, I'm sure, by the translation), and is genuinly unique.

He can also make you laugh - the first four pages of the final section are so utterly miserable I had to stop myself laughing. You really begin to wonder if he's playing to the crowd. But he does it so well, that you can't help but forgive him.