SOURCE: Aciman, André. “Out of Novemberland.” New York Review of Books 45, no. 19 (3 December 1998): 44-7.

In the following review, Aciman contends that The Rings of Saturn, despite its ostensible interest in historical interconnections and cosmic coincidences, is a self-absorbed meditation with a flawed form that prevents Sebald from transcending his private intellectual concerns.

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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. The words with which W. G. Sebald closes the first tale of The Emigrants, a volume of four tales published less than two years ago, have, like everything else Sebald writes, a somber, cadenced, liturgical sound to them. They evoke resigned Old World languor, and something else as well, which isn't lodged in the words themselves but in their tonality, and which hovers above them like the echo of Old Country speak, where people still put the subject at the tail end of a sentence—because...