SOURCE: Roberson, Matthew. Review of The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald. Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 3 (fall 1998): 241-42.

In the following review, Roberson judges The Rings of Saturn favorably, asserting that it contains engaging intelligence and prose.

The narrator of The Rings of Saturn (who both is and is not W. G. Sebald in this combination of fiction, travel writing, historical study, and memoir) makes clear again and again his fascination with the life and work of Thomas Browne. He admires, in particular, Browne's “Musaeum Clausum,” a “catalogue of remarkable books … listing pictures, antiquities and sundry singular items.” What distinguishes this catalogue for the narrator, in addition to its eclectic scope, is that, like another of his favorite texts, Borges's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, it deals with “our attempts to invent secondary or tertiary worlds”; the items in Browne's text “may have formed part of...