SOURCE: Enright, D. J. “The German Ocean.” London Review of Books (17 September 1998): 27.

In the following review, Enright commends Sebald's “seductive” and “entrancing” writing in The Rings of Saturn, but finds his digressions occasionally dull and his melancholy overdetermined.

Change and decay in all around we see. As one of W. G. Sebald's epigraphs points out, the rings of Saturn are probably fragments of a moon, broken up by tidal effect when its orbit decayed.

In August 1992, we are told, Sebald walked through coastal Suffolk. Possibly because of the ‘paralysing horror’ caused in him by the traces of destruction he observed, a year later he was admitted to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital ‘in a state of almost total immobility’. We might like to know more about his condition (the reference to Gregor Samsa and his little legs doesn't help much), its diagnosis and how it was treated. But...