Sebald, who died in an auto accident in in 2001 at the age of 57, is widely considered one of the great writers of 20th C literature.  Born in Germany, he emigrated to England in 1970 where he received his PhD and then taught at the University of East Anglia.  I’ve read and been intrigued by all four of his novels, “The Rings of Saturn”, “The Emigrants”, “Austerlitz”, and “Vertigo” along with his non-fiction book about the bombing of Germany in WWII.

This book is rather strange and dream-like.  Built around a character (?Sebald) who after spending time in a mental hospital after a breakdown, undertakes a walk along England’s east coast from Norwich through Lowestoft and many other villages. Along the way, the narrator describes the decline and disappearance of built environments from vacation hotels to grand manor houses and accompanies his musings on time and loss with grainy black and white photographs.  There are many diversions as the narrator follows Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a character who has begun to pop up in diverse literary settings including one NYT By the Book interview where the author described Browne’s ‘The Urn’ as being one of the books on his nightstand.  We also learn about Swinburne, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, the WWII slaughter of Bosnians by Croats (presaging the Balkan War of the 1980s), Joseph Conrad and the horrendous colonization of the Congo by Belgium, the Battle of Sole Bay in which the Dutch lost their fleet in 1672, herring fisheries,  and all manner of other fascinating historical facts and figures.  But to what end???

The blurbs on the covers of this edition describe the book in better terms than I can. Roberta Silman in the NYT wrote, “Stunning and strange—like a dream you want to last forever.” James Wood, the Harvard Professor and New Yorker critic wrote, “One of the mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. And here, in ‘The Rings of Saturn’ is a book more uncanny than ‘The Emigrants.”. While Cynthia Ozick simply described the book as ‘sublime’.   Two of my favorite authors, Nicole Krauss and Geoff Dyer also weighed in with high praise.

Having read this book twice and his other books as well, I would say that Sebald is an acquired taste, but once having tasted his work, one hungers for more.

I looked back to my review of ‘The Rings of Saturn’ from 2014 where I evidently took better notes while reading. Here’s a link to my review where I went into even more detail about Sebald’s detailed digressions:https://epsteinreads.com/the-rings-of-saturn-w-g-sebald-1696/.

If you don’t know Sebald, I’d urge you to make his acquaintance.  A fascinating writer about time and its impact of people, places, and things.