"... That odd youthful pastime of mine is no doubt why I was so strongly
affected by a certain passage toward the end of a novel called The Rings of Saturn, originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn,
by the late W. G. Sebald, the German writer who had emigrated in the
sixties to the United Kingdom, where he spent the rest of his life and
which is the setting for much of his writing. It was in England that
Sebald wrote his dissertation, in English, on another German writer,
Alfred Döblin, author of the masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz and a Jewish refugee from Hitler—just as was, for example, the great scholar Erich Auerbach, whose magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature begins with an analysis of the looping, digressive style, known as ring composition, that is found in Homer’s Odyssey.
Döblin and Auerbach, in fact, died within weeks of each other, in
1957: the kind of near-coincidence beloved of Sebald, as we shall see. ..."
The Paris Review
2011 July: The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald, 2015 February: ‘Drowned in a sea of salt’ Blake Morrison on the literature of the east coast, 2015 April: Patience (After Sebald) - (2010)
