SOURCE: Wood, James. “The Right Thread.” New Republic 219, no. 1 (6 July 1998): 38-42.

In the following review, Wood discusses what he considers Sebald's pessimistic aesthetic and preoccupation with death in The Rings of Saturn.

Anxious, daring, extreme, muted—only an annulling wash of contradictory adjectives can approach the agitated density of W. G. Sebald's writing. For this German who has lived in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. When his book The Emigrants appeared two years ago, one immediately recalled Walter Benjamin's remark in his essay on Proust that all great works found a new genre or dissolve an old one. Here was the first contemporary writer since Beckett to have found a way to protest the good government of the conventional novel-form and to harass realism into a state of self-examination.

And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a...