The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald is a walking meditation, literally. The narrator recounts historical, literary, and cultural changes in the context of a walking tour of bits of the east coast of England. It's a lamentation, given the narrator's accounts of the 1987 hurricane that ravaged the southern half of the UK and the car crash that almost killed him. You're reading about uprooted trees and barren landscapes, about accidents and injuries, and then put in context, you're meant to understand them as the effects of colonial oppression, class warfare, and environmental destruction. In this aspect of lamentation, the book is more like J. G. Ballard's Day of Creation than James Joyce's Ulysses. The natural setting of Ballard's book plays a role similar to Sebald's. In Joyce, Dublin is just there. It's not really an actor. In The Rings of Saturn, nature has agency, just as the river did in Ballard's novel.

Once you understand the point of the hurricane story and the automobile accident, the reason for Sebald's choice of the title of the book is clear. Saturn's rings were formed when two planets collided in the early history of our solar system. A smaller one, caught by gravity, caught by forces it couldn't resist, smashed into a larger planet and was destroyed. The larger planet is what we know as Saturn. The remnants of the smaller planet became Saturn's rings. In the book, contemporary society and the narrator are the rings; Saturn is history. It's not a happy allegory.