SOURCE: Howell-Jones, Gareth. “A Doubting Pilgrim's Happy Progress.” Spectator 280, no. 8860 (30 May 1998): 34-5.

In the following review, Howell-Jones commends Sebald's use of anecdotes, observations, and coincidences to impute a sense of orderliness to the process of worldly decay in The Rings of Saturn.

Lying in a hospital bed, ‘in a state of almost total immobility', W. G. Sebald, a German lecturer long domiciled in England, recalls a walking tour of Suffolk made the previous year. In calm, formal prose well-suited to the barren beauty of that coast, he tracks his mind's wanderings through the literary and historical associations evoked by his journey.

The range of his susceptibilities is immense. One might have expected the affectionate portrait of Edward FitzGerald and perhaps the entertaining account of Swinburne seeking desolation in the lost town of Dunwich. But Sebald, impelled by a grave fancy, can go much further, into stranger territory. He...