Sebald, W.G. (1995). Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8218-4448-0. Sebald said of The Emigrants, which was published a few years before Rings but shares many of its features:

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history

Gutbrod, Hans (31 May 2023). "Sebald's Path in Wertach -- Commemorating the Commemorator". Cultures of History Forum. doi: 10.25626/0146 . Retrieved 6 June 2023.it’s a form of prose fiction. I imagine it exists more frequently on the European continent than in the Anglo-Saxon world, i.e., dialogue plays hardly any part at all. Everything is related round various corners in a periscopic sort of way. In that sense it doesn’t conform to the patterns that standard fiction has established… But what exactly to call it, I don’t know. The irretrievability of the past turns out to be the main subject of the long conversation that takes place during the narrator’s visit to Michael Hamburger. Hamburger describes to him how, many years after the war, he had returned to Berlin and gone to the building where his parents had had their apartment, a building where the plasterwork garlands, the familiar railing, the names on the mailboxes—many of which, Hamburger notes, have not changed—now appear to him Peter Morgan distinguishes the "novel" Austerlitz from the "prose narratives" Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn ('The Sign of Saturn: Melancholy, Homelessness and Apocalypse in W.G. Sebald's Prose Narratives.' In: Franz-Josef Deiters (ed.), Passagen: 50 Jahre Germanistik an der Monash Universität. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2010, pp. 491–517, p. 491). Christian Hein, 'Rezeption | Deutschsprachiger Raum'. In: Claudia Öhlschläger, Michael Niehaus (eds.), W.G. Sebald-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, pp. 300–305, p. 300: " Austerlitz wurde international begeistert rezipiert, von der Literaturkritik frenetisch gefeiert und verlieh Sebald den Status eines modernen Klassikers." This is where they landed,’ he says, pointing to another spot on the map. ‘Just a small walk from where we are standing. I’ll show you later on.’

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

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. I do not know how to read this except as the book disowning itself, observing, as best it can, the decencies of mourning with a gesture towards the renunciation not only of memory, but of experience itself.Update: As Geoff Dyer gently but firmly points out below, my remark about Sebald’s influence on his work is pretty roundly contradicted by the chronology of publication. Sebald’s “The Emigrants” didn’t appear in English until 1996, by which point Dyer had published “The Missing of the Somme” and had finished writing “Out of Sheer Rage.” The latter book in particular was on my mind when I mentioned Dyer’s being “inspired” by Sebald. I have to come out with my hands up on this point: what I initially described as Sebald’s influence on Dyer is much closer to an affinity, and perhaps has more to do with the shared influence of Thomas Bernhard. (As Dyer points out in his comment, he wrote “Out of Sheer Rage” during a period of “chronic Bernhard addiction”.)

The Rings of Saturn - Penguin Books UK

And since the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature, Browne scrutinises that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths. That purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus—what does it mean? Martin, James R. (2013). "On Misunderstanding W.G. Sebald" (PDF). Cambridge Literary Review. IV (7): 123–38. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 March 2016 . Retrieved 4 March 2016.Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.” W.G. Sebald, "Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis." Gespräche 1971 bis 2001, ed. Torsten Hoffmann, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011, p. 77: "Ich hasse [...] den deutschen Nachkriegsroman wie die Pest." Ironically, Sebald received the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 1997. The Rings of Saturn. London: Harvill. ( Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt) English ed. 1998