A review by opl
Die Ringe des Saturn by W.G. Sebald

4.25

Structurally The Rings of Saturn might be W.G. "Max" Sebald's most complex book: after an extended hospital stay the narrator – presumably Sebald – embarks on a pilgrimage (or rather strannik), falling into reminiscences. While his previous prose works (Vertigo & The Emigrants) similarly explored history through intertextuality and auto-fiction, the separate parts the books consist of are never directly, only by themes and diaristic passages linked – whereas in Rings of Saturn, his penultimate work, Sebald seamlessly weaves narratives into his thanatourism across East Anglia; a distinctly sebaldian style that would culminate with Austerlitz. 

 

Throughout the novel Sebald's observations take on grotesque qualities; he's plagued, followed by memory and historical consciousness – towns turn into necropolises, a walk by the sea into a kafkaesque labyrinth. As Luke Jones from About Buildings + Cities puts it »The sebaldian way of looking is partly the trick of looking at things a little too long, allowing the process of free association to run a bit further than it should until it becomes strange, like looking for shapes in the clouds.« – the sebaldian way of looking. While defining this word may lend it a homological meaning, when distilling the countless interpretations, we essentially find 'sebaldian' to describe an act of flaneuring time and memory, a sort of elegiac travelogue. 

 

At first glance, the title bears only faint relation to its contents – Saturn is directly referenced solely in passing, paraphrasing Sir Thomas Browne (or are these Sebald's thoughts after all?) as he likens the setting of night's veil above the German Sea to the planet's scythe; a vague connection could also be found in Edward Fitzgerald's referenced translation – although it only loosely functions as such – of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (»Up from Earth's Centre though the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate […]«). In fact, we must rather understand the book's central metaphor as a state, in which history (in the form of a celestial satellite, the heading citation informs us) collapses onto itself: in the gravitational pull of the now, memory orbits around all, atomized and scattered. Sebald traverses this cosmos, focusing, so that these vestiges seemingly form concentric rings. 

 

There is, however, another in a way much clearer connection to the 'novel' itself; Sebald in one chapter references the Zivilisationsbruch of the Heeresgruppe E and one Kurt Waldheim's involvement –  Waldheim later on, as Sebald details, took on the role of delivering a greeting from beyond humanities grave of sorts, having a recording of his voice put aboard the Voyager II probe, during his tenure as UN state secretary. While on their infinite journey, its sister-craft would go on to take the now famous photograph pale blue dot.  

 

Some fifteen years later – five years after Sebald's passing – NASA's Cassini payed homage to this image, juxtaposing earth against the towering shadows of the Rings of Saturn, inadvertently bringing this chiffre full circle. 

 

Although Sebald had no way of knowing about this 'connection' of course, it encapsulates the essence of the book astoundingly well: a leitmotiv throughout his oeuvre is the Shoah, and, more broadly, genocide and cataclysmic violence, principally that perpetrated by the West. Whilst in other works these remain at the same time omnipresent as well as 'unerzählt', Rings of Saturn directly connects all these events, in this often exploring their roots in European imperialism and further alluding to the [generational] traumata they leave behind  – shown poignantly, for instance, in the tale of emigrant/lyricist Michael Hamburger, friend and collaborator of Max's. Inhumanity casts a deep shadow over the entirety of the narratives, looming as the concentric rings do over the pale blue dot; for Sebald »history is a nightmare from which [he's] trying to awake«.