W.G. Sebald - The Rings Of Saturn (Vintage, 2020) ****½

German author W.G. Sebald was also a professor of literature, and was appointed at the University of East Anglia in Norwich UK. Like his other novels "Austerlitz"(2001), "A Place In the Country" (1998), and "The Emigrants" (1992), Sebald's writing fits in a category of its own, a kind of literary non-fiction. In "The Rings Of Saturn", originally published in German in 1995, he describes a long walk along the British east coast, starting is Lowestoft, walking south to Orford, then travelling back inland to the north-west. 

Like in his other books, the travels are just a pretext to tell stories and reflections on historical events that took place in relation to the places he visits. As you can see from the 'content' pages below, he can talk about almost anything yet always with a great passion for the subject, a kind of naive enthusiasm while keeping a cynical distance at the same time. He talks about Chateaubriand, Sir Thomas Browne, Swinburne, fishing fleets, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. His deep interest lies always in the past, in the 19th and early 20th century, and his mood is one of melancholy as if he had hoped to have witnessed those things first hand. His knowledge on the subjects he covers is wide, and he must often also acknowledge that he does not know how he knows this. He can say, "I could not identify where I read this information".

He marvels at the world, at people, at inventions, at nature and animals, and whatever the subject, his writing is entertaining, beautiful and very literary. And always, behind the light-footed tone, behind the apparent sometimes insignificant trivia, behind the text, there is a sense of loss, of doom, of darkness. 

On Sir Thomas Browne: 

"Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowl­edge is enveloped in darkness. "What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world". (p. 19)

On the herring:  

"An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unex­plained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this eccentric undertaking, as I read some time ago in a history of artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness." (p. 58-59)

Yet his trivia are also fun. He knows how to take the reader by the hand, and make him/her look at things differently. He also tells for instance the story of his grandmather who kept goldfish, and who washed her each of them with soap every day, and then put them on the windowsill to let them enjoy the air a little bit, before putting them back in their aquarium. Or this description is typical of how he builds up his descriptions to a climax. 

"No details of the end of the three-master have come down to us. There were eye­witnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weeks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour" (p. 77)

I can also appreciate his view on Belgium, yet not entirely either. 

"And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the popu­lation, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere." (p. 122)

Deep down, something is indeed terribly wrong with our world, and he sees things evolving for the worst, affecting the author too. 

"It is as if everything was somehow hollowed out. Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even the sheets of paper on which one endeavours to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane" (p. 182)

Brilliant.