*****
Die Ringe des Saturn is a travelogue of sorts, a collection of anecdotes centred upon Sebald's walking tour through the English coastal county of Suffolk. The writer makes the decision to go on his trek after recovering in hospital from a fairly serious bout of illness, and this causes the book to have a profound sense of both intro- and retrospection, colouring his thoughts and the descriptions of the countryside with which he provides the reader.
This, however, is far from being a straight account of what Mr. Sebald did on his holiday. Unable to stick to a simple, descriptive retelling of his tour, Sebald goes off at tangents at every opportunity. A glance out over the cliffs to the choppy North Sea soon segues seamlessly into stories of seventeenth-century naval battles or colonial wars in South Africa. At times, it's a little like Christmas dinner with a senile old uncle, with a story from the past just around every corner...
Of course, this is all very deliberate. While Die Ringe des Saturn may, at first glance, appear to be akin to something written by Bill Bryson (albeit more stylishly and with less toilet humour), there are patterns to be found in the apparent madness of the structure. A recurring theme is the cruel nature of time, eating away inevitably, unstoppably, at institutions once thought eternal. His visits to stately homes, once regal, now moth-eaten and drab, reflect his gloomy view of his own mortality. Even the land itself is proven to be less than permanent - in one chapter, he gazes out over the remains of a once-thriving coastal town, a church precariously balanced on a cliff the only reminder of a settlement which has been swallowed by the unforgiving sea.
Sebald also uses Die Ringe des Saturn to examine post-colonialism, with most of the chapters either looking back at Imperial times or examining how the end of the Empire has affected the places he visits. Seen through this lens, the apparently random collection of academic anecdotes he comes up with (including tales of house burning in Ireland, slave-driving in the Congo, intervention in Chinese civil wars, a trip to the battlefields of Waterloo) actually make perfect sense. There's a structure to the book, a carefully-planned design which holds it all together to form an impressive finished product. Now, if only I could work out exactly what that is...
Reading Die Ringe des Saturn was great fun as it's the kind of book you can savour slowly, stopping after each of Sebald's musings to ponder on the significance of the vignette you've just finished. The language is slightly unusual in German (Sebald's Wikipedia page claims that his German is occasionally a little old-fashioned), and it can take a little deciphering. He frequently uses the very German Russian-doll construction of using a series of relative clauses one within the other, leaving the reader hanging until the end of a very long sentence to discover how the first clause actually ends. It certainly makes you concentrate very carefully on the text :)
Another fairly unique element to Sebald's writing is his use of photographs to support the text. The book is full of his snapshots, or reproductions of paintings or public documents, and the effect is to give the text a more non-fiction feel, making it into more of an academic work. However, underneath this dry top layer of the text, there is a sense of a narrative, an underlying fiction which works against the apparent historical, factual writing above. I am very aware that this makes extremely little sense outside my head...
Die Ringe des Saturn is a wonderful read - the fact that I ordered a copy of Austerlitz immediately after finishing it shows that I was very impressed -, but I was still not entirely sure what to make of it. Was it a wonderfully-plotted work, or did Sebald simply ramble on about things I didn't really need to know? Luckily, the answer eventually popped into my head in the form of a polite query (the sort of thing a certain Amateur Reader might say...): why can't the book be both a work of genius and the height of self-indulgence? They're certainly not mutually exclusive...
And I think that's where I'll leave it for today - if anyone has any other ideas, you know where to find me ;)
