Bøker av W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, and an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century The Times

The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII.Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: "On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation."

At moments when reality shows itself to be unstable or uncanny, we experience a form of vertigo. This experience is further complicated when we try to transform experience into writing, and fact clashes with memory. Sebald's novel, part fiction, part travelogue explores this theme.

I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish emigres in the twentieth century.