The Rings of Saturn

by W.G Sebald

This one’s a novel – a rambling narrative of geography, literature and objects and it’s punctuated, as are all of Sebald’s books, by these odd little photographs, which often don’t appear to bear any relationship to what’s in the text at all. I think Sebald was actually sued a couple of times for copyright infringement, because he just photographs things out of books and then sticks them in his novels. He breaks all the rules. He just sticks a picture in the middle of the page. At times they illustrate what he’s talking about, but just as often they don’t. As a novelist, I think he’s spawned a whole industry which theorises the relationship of pictures to words.