Rings of Saturn

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W.G. Sebald

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Pages: 304 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0099448920

Pub: Vintage

Pub date: 2002-11-07

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 13720

Editorial Review:

In August 1992, W.G. Sebald set off on a walking tour of Suffolk, one of England's least populated and most striking counties. A long project--presumably The Emigrants, his great anatomy of exile, loss and identity--had left him spent. Initially his tour was a carefree one. Soon, however, Sebald was to happen upon "traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past", in a series of encounters so intense that a year later he found himself in a state of collapse in a Norwich hospital.
The Rings of Saturn is his record of these travels, a phantasmagoria of fragments and memories, fraught with dizzying knowledge and desperation and shadowed by mortality. As in The Emigrants, past and present intermingle: the living come to seem like supernatural apparitions while the dead are vividly present. Exemplary sufferers such as Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement people the author's solitude along with various eccentrics and even an occasional friend. Indeed, one of the most moving chapters concerns his fellow German exile--the writer Mi chael Hamburger.
"How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being or, if not oneself, then one's own precursor?" Sebald asks. "The fact that I first passed through British customs 33 years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol--none of these things are particularly strange. But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer ..."
Sebald seems most struck by those who lived or live quietly in adversity, "the shadow of annihilation" always hanging over them. The appropriately surnamed George Wyndham Le Strange, for example, remained on his vast property in increasing isolation, his life turning into a series of colourful anecdotes. He was "reputed to have been surrounded, in later years, by all manner of feathered creatures: by guinea fowl, pheasants, pigeons and quail, and various kinds of garden and song birds, strutting about him on the floor or flying around in the air. Some said that one summer Le Strange dug a cave in his garden and sat in it day and night like St. Jerome in the desert."

In Sebald's eyes, even the everyday comes to seem extraterrestrial--a vision intensified in Michael Hulse's beautiful rendition. His complex, allusive sentences are encased in several-pages-long paragraphs-- style and subject making for painful, exquisite reading. Though most often hypersensitive to human (and animal) suffering and making few concessions to obligatory cheeriness, Sebald is not without humour. At one point, paralysed by the presence of the past, he admits: "I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel." The Rings of Saturn is a challenging nocturne and the second of Sebald's four books to appear in English. - -Kerry Fried

Reader Reviews:

Walk into a magical Journey (16/17 people found this helpful)

This is a wonderful book, ostensibly a chronical of a walk along the suffolk coast from Lowestoft to Orfordness; Sebold weaves into this pedestrian tale a compendium of remarkable, human stories and tales from around the world. A life affirming book that reminds us how we each have the whole world within us.

Out of Nowhere (21/21 people found this helpful)

This was the first sebald book I purchased. It is like nothing I have read before or since. The fact that it has no story as such is immaterial to enjoyment of the often dream like qualities of this book. There is a narrative thread in the form of a journey through East Anglia but this is broken by tangental episodes and characters that drift in often seemingly from out of nowhere. This mixture of abstraction and convention is held together by an elegiac low key prose style which I find completely beguiling. Sebald has a way of communicating facts and historical episodes that make them seem fresh although the subject matter is often disturbing. The fact that as a book it is difficult to pin down in terms of style and type only enhances the compelling, enigmatic and ultimately uplifting qualities of this book. It is one of the few books I constantly return to especially after reading a highly rated 'bestseller' (which invariably doesn't come close in terms of written quality or content).

strange news from another star (10/10 people found this helpful)

'Rings of Saturn' is Sebald's greatest work. It has a finesse of description, and an ethereal prose style, that would be hampered by a strong narrative. In fact, Sebald is not terribly good at plot, as I believe 'Austerlitz' demonstrates. In 'Rings' the lives of the lonely and vanishing characters seem to drift in and out of vision, like figures in a misty landscape, without the artist trying to grasp them.

Something like attending a seance to which only the ghosts of obscure historical personages are summoned, 'Rings' is a beautifully melancholy read.

More history than fiction (10/22 people found this helpful)

If you are coming to this book from the redoubtable Austerlitz, make sure you know what you are getting. Rings of Saturn is not something I would describe as a novel, nor, as it says on the back cover, as travel writing or memoirs; and although it does brush against all of these genres, it sits most comfortably in the genre of history.
Austerlitz is one of my favourite books, but what you get in that - characterisation, emotion, opining, narrative thread - you get none of in ROS. ROS is a loose account of Sebald's journey across the east coast of England, where he lived and worked and died - and not a very inspiring area; but the way he constructs this book is with a collection of historical accounts: on the life of Joseph Conrad for example, and finds himself able to link them together, as it were, but the links are quite weak, and I don't think Sebald intended them to be particularly strong, more rambling and meditative; and the narrative is also quite weak, it goes literally nowhere, but again, I believe this was intentional, it is decidedly anti-plot. What I am unsure of is what Sebald's overall aim of this work was - it felt to me like the work he 'had to do' before he could write the masterpiece that is Austerlitz, but I wasn't entirely satisfied. I think this will be of interest if you enjoy what is called 'creative non-fiction' such as the historical works of Anthony Beevor, but there is not as much focus in this work, although there is probably a little more artistry. Sebald's style is like an aged cognac or an extended Chopin nocturne - lyrical and delectable - but not something you want all the time, and this is how I will treat this volume. His other works, like Emigrants, have more oomph, and can be better written, like Austerlitz, but this is still worth a read if you bear in mind the flaws.

A Tristram Shandy for the Twentieth Century (10/10 people found this helpful)

Ostensibly an account of a walk but in reality a dark journey to the bottom of the soul. Sebald's knowledge of local, European and world history and literature is unsurpassed. He leads us through a landscape of dilapidated coastal resorts, decadent country houses, disused seaports, closed branch lines and towns that have literally fallen into the sea and he uses these surroundings as the catalyst for a broad, fascinating discourse on the loss brought about by man's destructive nature and the ineluctable passing of time. His brings his acute, perceptive intelligence to bear on the silk industry, the books of Thomas Browne, Chateaubriand, Rembrandt, Dutch Elm Disease, the Great Storm of 1987, the Rape of the Summer Palace in Peking, his dim recollections of childhood in Nazi Germany and the propaganda films he was shown at school.
In each case, our past sins come back to haunt us in this elegiac, mental odyssey. Sebald's sense of collective guilt is so acute, we can only hope that in tribute to this genius's passing, the world mourns him with equal sensitivity and intensity.

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