W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, may be a novel–in which case it isn’t a very good novel, rippling and riffing through the fates of characters and issues we barely know–or it may be an autobiographical account of a walking tour of Suffolk Sebald took after recovering from a serious, mysterious illness–in which case it is a splendid work of slightly fictionalized nonfiction. Let’s assume that this discursive, elegiac work, contoured along the lines of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, a 17th century meditation on how we bury the dead, isn’t a novel. It’s too good a piece of wandering reflection, […]