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| View Larger Image | The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
by Michael Hulse
| | List Price: | $15.95 | | Price: | $10.85 | | You Save: | $5.10 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 23129 | | Studio: | New Directions Publishing Corporation | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 296 | | Publication Date: | April 01, 1999 | | Publisher: | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Book Description
"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn-with its curious archive of photographs-chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph." |
Amazon.com
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 Michael 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 thirty-three 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 colorful 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 humor. At one point, paralyzed 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. The excellent news is that his novel Vertigo is already slated for translation. --Kerry Fried |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 41 reviews)
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The night of time far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox? 
Sebald takes a walk in Suffolk. He sees places and things, and remembers people and books, and thinks of history. This triggers reflections on natural, social and cultural decay, on human greed and callousness, on inhuman monstrosities.
It goes like this: he is in Lowestoft, the easternmost city of England, in an area that is depressed and that had a somewhat more glorious past. Fisheries, shipping, shipbuilding have all declined dramatically, actually all but disappeared. Joseph Conrad had lived there for a while. Off we go into a part biography of Konrad Korzeniowski, up until he experiences the heart of darkness and walks out of his job in the Congo. We learn about colonialism's darkest sides, then the narration shifts, like a relay baton, to Roger Casement, who had been British Consul in the Congo and who blew the whistle on the practices, of course to no avail. But the man proceeded to do the same in his next post in the Amazon area and ended up siding with the white Indians of Ireland, which earned him a death sentence and a hanging for treason.
Sebald walked South and at the river Blyth he saw the narrow gauge railway track, of the train that had been made for an emperor of China, but had not been delivered, so it runs in Southwold now ('now' being early 1990s). So off we go: into the last decades of the doomed and inefficient and callous Qing dynasty, with the picture book Empress Dowager, back to the British infamy of the Opium Wars, the tremendous upheaval of the Taiping Rebellion, the massacres and famines.
There is more of course. There is the walking itself, the country and sea, the people met. And more stories, my two examples are just the ones that interested me most (a. Conrad, b.China).
The headline quote is from Thomas Browne, of the 17th century. Other authors that are woven into the narrative of the walk, either by their life or by their work, are Kafka, Flaubert, Diderot, Levi-Strauss, Borges, Stendhal, Swinburne, Hoelderlin, Grimmelshausen, Omar Quayam, Chateaubriand ...
This is maybe the most bookish 'travel book' that I have found. Maybe it is not for everyone, but for me it is just right.
April 27, 2008 | |
Uncanny 
I read this book and was at first pleasantly surprised. This book
is like stepping into the aftermath of a profound dream which has finished way after you first discover it. This is a great book for "literary types" like me but I think many readers will struggle with it. It also helps if you know a lot of historical stuff. I don't and I was
really struggling to understand a lot of what the author was talking about at points and I got very confused. Sebald is a brilliant man but
like another reviewer pointed out he needs a better editor. I like this book but it needs something extra to push it from being good to being
brilliant. But what do I know.
John
August 17, 2007 | |
A book of digressions and odd tangents 
It takes a unique mind to create a book like this one, an extended walking tour along the eastern coast of England that turns into a series of stories, digressions about Dutch art, Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, the persistence of Belgium's dark colonial past, the Taiping Rebellion, the decline of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the development of the silk industry, and many other things. At first these multiple stories seem random, but Sebald gradually reveals the connections between these disparate places and times. It also becomes clear that Sebald is drawn to contemplate human destructiveness, natural decay and eccentric individuals. He is exceptionally observant and his dominant tone is melancholy. These elegiac ruminations and memories will certainly not be everyone's cup of tea, and I found myself wondering if this part of England is really as desolate and sad as Sebald makes it seem. Nevertheless he has an ability to create a mood and an atmosphere like few other writers.
July 09, 2007 | |
A Curious Journey
This is a most unusual novel. In fact, many might be reluctant to even term it a novel.
Whatever one decides to call it, it is a most curious, enlightening and entertaining experience.
The novel, since he chose to term it such, is an account of a walking tour the late author took through England's East Anglia, his home for some 20 years and where he taught at university.
The novel recounts his experiences (perhaps fictionalized), the people he encounters--most of them remarkable for their eccentricities--and his thoughts along the way, which include dreams, memories, Britain's pastoral and imperial past. There are dissertations on China and the Opium Wars, herring fisheries and the introduction of the silk industry to Britain.
In addition, there are great swaths of comment on an assortment of historical figures--Thomas Browne, Edward FitzGerald, the poet Swinburne, Chateaubriand and Joseph Conrad, to name a few. And, scattered throughout the book, are a collection of photographs, some not quite in focus and adding to the dreamlike quality of the text.
Whether you consider it a novel or not, you are certain to come away with much to think about for days after you've read the last page.
May 12, 2007 | |
The Archaeology of Loss
Sebald is an archaeologist of loss. In this book, tied together by a barely-fictionalized account of a walking tour of the Suffolk coast, he starts with cultural detritus that would be beneath the notice of most travel writers and reaches into his reading of history and literature, his chilhood memories, even his dreams, to weave a complex elegy to vanished civilizations. Although there are fewer of the grainy photographs which give other Sebald books a documentary air, this one is closer to a straight memoir than any of the four that I have read. But its geography is less of a place than of the author's extraordinary mind: its mountains map the barren wilderness of wanton destruction; its rivers chart the forces of commercialism, colonial exploitation, and greed which are its cause. Yet the book is also illuminated by Sebald's humility, his curiosity, and his delight in the human capacity for joyful obsession, whether it be Chateaubriand's love for an English vicar's daughter, or a Suffolk farmer who spent thirty years building a model of the Temple of Jerusalem in his barn.
November 19, 2006 | |
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