SOURCE: Stow, Randolph. “The Plangency of Ruins.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4974 (31 July 1998): 11.

In the following review, Stow offers favorable comments on what he considers Sebald's mournful tone and unique narrative style in The Rings of Saturn.

W. G. Sebald, Professor of German at the University of East Anglia, has lived in that region since 1970, but was born in 1944, in what was left of Nazi Germany. The Rings of Saturn is his second work to appear in English, having been preceded by The Emigrants, a book whose haunting qualities have been saluted by critics as diverse as A. S. Byatt and Tariq Ali.

Both volumes are described by the publisher as “works of fiction”, an unexpected categorization in view of their contents. The narrator of The Rings of Saturn is certainly a man called Sebald, since he regards “the holy prince of heaven Saint Sebolt”, another restless and self-dissatisfied...