SOURCE: Morrison, Blake. “Suffolk through Death-Tinted Specs.” New Statesman 127, no. 4388 (5 June 1998): 45-6.

In the following review, Morrison credits Sebald with an idiosyncratic style, melancholic perspective, and engaging storytelling in The Rings of Saturn.

This is one of the strangest books I've ever read. Finishing it, I went out and bought W G Sebald's previous book, the much acclaimed The Emigrants (1996), after which it seemed less strange since the two have much in common: an acute sense of place, a fascination with émigrés and eccentrics, a dislike of paragraphing, a uniquely seductive tone of voice. The Emigrants is the more successful work. Even so, there is nothing quite like The Rings of Saturn.

Ostensibly, it describes a journey on foot through coastal Norfolk and Suffolk, but it isn't a travel book. It gives accounts of the Battle of Sole Bay, the rise and fall of silkworm breeding in...