Philippa Comber, 'Autorbiographie'. In: Claudia Öhlschläger, Michael Niehaus (eds.), W.G. Sebald-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, pp. 5–9, p. 9. W.G. Sebald resides in the intellectual world so any event in his life brings up some literary, cultural or historical reminiscences…

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald | Goodreads

Sebald’s model-maker is in fact based on a real person, an Englishman named Alec Garrard who spent thirty years working on a 1:100 scale model of the Temple. But it is hard not to think that if Garrard hadn’t existed, Sebald would have had to make him up. The unfinishable model of the Temple is the perfect symbol of Sebald’s manner as well as of his subject, both of which are aligned with the pessimistic model of narrative, Erich Auerbach’s “Hebrew” style, which derives its uncanny power and devastating realism precisely from that which cannot be represented. In a number of interviews, Sebald claimed that his third given name was "Maximilian" – this has, however, turned out not to be the case; see Uwe Schütte, W.G. Sebald. Leben und literarisches Werk. Berlin/Boston, MA: de Gruyter, 2020, p. 8. The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlön. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory. In a different view, the world and everything now living in it was created only moments ago, together with its complete but illusory pre-history. A third school of thought variously describes our earth as a cul-de-sac in the great city of God, a dark cave crowded with incomprehensible images, or a hazy aura surrounding a better sun.It is also a rather ancient area of human habitation. It was colonized by the Angles in the reasonably recent Christian era (about the fifth century) but it is also full of archeological finds from the Stone Age, Bronze Age and other eras up to the present. (This is where that famous Anglo-Saxon burial ship with full regal regalia was found, for instance.) Patt, Lise et al. (eds.). Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald. ICI Press, 2007. An anthology of essays on Sebald's use of images, with artist's projects inspired by Sebald. So 2.5 stars, I suppose, although stars are kind of immaterial when it comes to this book. And speaking about the stars, let me digress… Oh wait, I’m NOT Sebald. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 162.

The Rings of Saturn Chapter 1 Summary | Course Hero The Rings of Saturn Chapter 1 Summary | Course Hero

It’s at this point I have to confess that the past 12 months have been a year of my own miserable thinking. Perhaps that’s why I disappeared so readily into The Rings of Saturn. But rather than reinforcing my mood, I found solace in Sebald’s. It may be despondent and worn down but it is not cynical, it is not blind to beauty and, at its heart, it carries an invigorating dedication to truth. All of which should perhaps inspire me to establish whether I really did go to Southwold when I was young and, if I did, what the food was like. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

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Sericulture is encouraged as a method for illustrating the manner with which humans are like, and can and should be treated like, insects. The ‘extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration’ is one of the least disguised references to the Holocaust in Sebald’s novel, and the fact that silk and sericulture leads us down into the gas chambers at last seems the primary thematic connection between silk and ash in the text. Third, when I mention “Sebald” as a person, I may be deceiving you. The narrator of this book appears to be its author – most of the time. But there are enough odd references and fantastical descriptions to make the reader suspect that the person telling these stories may be part-fiction. Throught the rest of the narrative, Sebald scrutinises a series of ruins or decaying spaces, tracing transmigrations, but also a history of complicity with brutality and destruction. There is no more pertinent example of this than the thread of silk the narrator follows down the ages, like Theseus retracing his steps out of the labyrinth after confronting the Minotaur.