The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald

As of this afternoon, I have completed the loose trilogy (if they even are that) that is Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn, but it turns out I read them out of order. The Emigrants was the first of Sebald's books to be published in English, in 1996, four years after it came out in the German original. The translation of The Rings of Saturn came two years later, in 1998, three years after it came out in German, and Vertigo came last in 1999, but it is the oldest of the three, having been published in German in 1990. I knew the English language publications didn't track the German originals, but I had somehow gotten it in my head that the proceeded backwards, and so I read The Rings of Saturn ahead of The Emigrants, which was a reread for me after nearly 20 years. I don't think the order particularly matters, though having read them all now back to back I do believe I see a progression in Sebald's style. 

The Rings of Saturn is the longest of the three books, and it covers the broadest set of material. Each of its ten (if memory serves) chapters covers a range of semi-connected topics that are outlined in the table of contents, but the writing itself moves seamlessly among these topics, while the table of contents itself seems almost nonsensical. The overarching framework for the book is a walking trip Sebald took along the depressed coast of East Anglia, but his meandering thoughts on this trip provide a history of the region then proceed to take him far from the shores of England. 

The conditions in which I read The Rings of Saturn were less ideal than when I read Vertigo immediately before. My life somehow got much fuller in those days and lacked long stretches for dedicated reading. These conditions worsened even more by the time I got to The Emigrants, the day after Labor Day. There was construction going on in my house, and then I had a 3 day work trip to DC taking up a whole weekend with extra long workdays. When I came back home, there were still two more days of construction and the following day I had a long term houseguest arriving. I couldn't read The Emigrants the way I would have liked to.

Like Vertigo, The Emigrants is divided into four sections. The sections are unequal in length. I was able to read the first one in a single sitting, which I think is the ideal way to do it. The second I also read all at once, or almost so. The third and fourth sections are longer, and my arrival at them coincided with the increased constraints on my time. Perhaps I should have waited altogether rather than read them in little pieces as I did. I only started the book nine days ago, but already my memory of the first two sections is faint. Still, the reread was helpful because about all I remembered from my first reading all those years ago was a sort of mood. 

When I typed up my post about Vertigo, I wrote, 

I think some other things put me off reading Sebald for a while: (1) I started to associate him with my youth, and (2) As I read other things over the years, I saw a mix of similar work and imitations (or, to be more kind, works likely inspired by him), and where once he had felt quite unique, my sense of his singularity diminished.

I've been thinking about both these points more as I've continued to read Sebald. The former particularly as I was reading The Emigrants, because I had read it in my (relative) youth. Reading it this time around and recognizing references here and there, I kept finding myself wondering what I knew when I read it in 2003, and what I had learned since, (and also, very occasionally, what I might have forgotten since then). But it's actually the latter point I wanted to talk about more: the books that have reminded me of Sebald.

The first book I remember reading and thinking, "this is doing what Sebald was doing," is the beautiful Belgian novel War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. (I see the Times noticed the similarities too.) It made my "also good" list from my 2018 year in review. Javier Marías' Dark Back of Time also has a similar construction (semi-autobiographical, includes pictures), and when I read it I did wonder if he had read Sebald, but Dark Back of Time (published in 1998) is nearly contemporaneous with Sebald's books, and so I also wondered if this was a micro trend in literature in the 1990s. With 25+ years of perspective, this explanation feels plausible. It's a very postmodern approach. But I was surprised to realize that Marías reminds me of Sebald in some ways I might not have thought about if reading Dark Back of Time hadn't juxtaposed them for comparison in my mind. The way Marías follows tangents and tells history is not unlike Sebald. As I was reading The Rings of Saturn, the book that most came to mind was Daša Drndić's EEG, which made quite an impression on me. I don't recall there being any pictures in EEG, but that book similarly winds through history pulling out detailed, possibly forgotten fragments that tell a larger story. None of this is meant to diminish Sebald's writing – I was incredibly moved reading these three books. If anything, I probably appreciated them more at this stage of my life, when I have read these other books and bring more to my reading of Sebald.