Abbey Hotel

I can’t remember when I read The Rings Of Saturn, but perhaps this is in keeping with the book. It’s one of the most enigmatic and mysterious works I’ve read. There is no fixed point, no real plot, no sense of purposeful direction or narrative intent, and yet its sense of melancholy stays with me as much as the gloriously haunting opening three sentences:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star.

What is Sebald talking about here? It’s impossible to know for sure, as he blends the start of a hike taken towards the end of the sultry dog days of summer, his own sense of existential despair and isolation and the myriad connotations of the Dog Star itself. But soon we learn that a year after the tour, he was admitted to hospital in Norwich “in a state of almost total immobility”. So, too, that Sebald’s carefree self is so often assailed by “traces of destruction”.

At the outset, then, we know that The Rings Of Saturn is not going to be a book for Hello! readers. Its seriousness of intent is obvious at once, and anyone who loves fine writing is in for a treat. I don’t quite understand how Sebald does what he does, but though his sentences meander in the most extraordinarily ethereal and elegiac fashion they are always compelling. Take this, for example: “the atmosphere at Schipol airport was so strangely muted that one might have thought one was already a good way beyond this world. As if they were under sedation or moving through time stretched or expanded, the passengers wandered the halls or, standing still on escalators, were delivered to their various destinations on high or underground.”

Both Sebald and those he observes are thus rendered as somehow passive beings, at the mercy of forces they cannot control, still less understand. Likewise, the black and white photographs which appear throughout The Rings Of Saturn and his other works. They would seem to be illustrative of a given thread or theme, but aren’t, instead appearing in counterpoint, as if they are only a possible interpretation of what Sebald is writing about.

It is all quite beautiful, if also melancholic to the core. Sebald, who was born in Germany in 1944, effortlessly turns his major preoccupations – the horror of the Second World War, the nature of memory, both personal and collective – into great literature. No wonder that Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in 2007 that Sebald would have been a worthy Nobel Prize winner. Sadly, he was killed in a car crash in Norfolk in 2001.