| View Larger Image | The Rings of Saturn | Paperbackby W.G. Sebald (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator)
| List Price: | $14.95 | | Price: | $10.17 | | You Save: | $4.78 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | New Directions | | Page Count: | 296 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 01, 1999 | | Sales Rank: | 45,559th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780811214131
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product 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 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 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 43 reviews)
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Clearing the underbrush from Memory Lane by Michael Battaglia  5 Stars
June 10, 2009
If you're reading this page then I probably don't need to say this but let me forewarn the unwary anyway . . . there's no plot to this book. At least not in the conventional sense. And it does not matter a whit. It's not the kind of novel that you read for pulse-pounding plot twists or thrilling moments of exciting actions. There are moments that thrill and there are moments that excite, but they do not involve explosions.
Let me explain. In essence, the heart of the book is this: a guy who may or may not be the author WG Sebald decides to take a walk. A very long walk down the English countryside and shore and God knows where else. Along that walk he does a lot of thinking and all that thinking gets piled in the book with a bunch of random photographs and the end result is something that is both static and shifting and frozen and very much alive. And wonderful.
Sebald strolls through zones like the only person left in the world, recording his observations both through his prose and pictures that may or may not reflect what he's really seeing. But the world unfolds to us through the novel, desolate landscapes held still in time, people with sad faces staring back at us from years already lost, light shining through black and white contrasted trees, gardens of loss blending into hallowed shadows. One of the tags down below here says "psychogeography" and that's probably the best way to describe the novel, as Sebald attempts to trace his own boundaries through a journey that not only takes him through a physical distance, but a mental one as well.
There's a difference between running and walking, even if both are used for exercise. With running, you never see anything, the goal is always the point and the getting there is simply a means. But when you walk you force yourself to see the world around you and often that stirs the brain into winding streams of thoughts. As Sebald goes, he discusses the history of the areas that he's strolling through, the narrative looping off into loose coils, the physical journey stopping even as we descend through history and time, as he drags forth the ghosts of other days and makes them recites the bygone days that have already passed them by.
It's an unusual technique, one that could come across as purely static, but yet it works. The narrative seems layered, with Sebald's observations often twisting into a story inside the tale, and sometimes going another layer deeper until you're no longer in the novel but inside another history, one already worn out and decided. People speak in other voices, clustered on the page and floating out of the past, coming through Sebald but also standing separately.
There's a weariness to the book and while I don't know his life, I wouldn't be surprised if the collapse that led to his hospitalization mentioned near the beginning of the novel really did happen to him. The stories, the observations, are all soaked in a kind of lingering disintegration, he resurrects the past only to show us how the elegantly organized structures begin to fall apart, how time wears away at what we know, how lives are whittled away and chiseled down. Houses empty, lovers depart, the land as we know it remains as it was and unrecognizable. History becomes a death spiral that we can't escape from, and only the landmarks are left behind. And when even those go, we get stories torn from memory.
It seems spun from steel gossamer, implacable and unrelenting and even after translation, strangely beautiful in its detached intensity, the way it all weaves together to make a world that can still be fascinating even as it teeters constantly on the edge of collapse. The final chapter about the silkworms, with its nested stories, may be the most poignant as the journey comes to a close. One sequence sticks with me. Through the others, Sebald may be describing himself: "Unfortunately, I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantastists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder."
He would write two more books before dying in a car accident. It's not a fair ending at all.
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No praise is enough for this jewel of a book by Aleksandra Nita-Lazar (MD, USA) 5 Stars
January 08, 2009
"The Rings of Saturn" is probably the best book of the German exile writer, W. G. Sebald. In this extraordinary, masterful novel-meditation-travelogue-philosophical treatise he departs, or at least so it seems, from the Holocaust theme, and sets out on a meditative trip around the county of Suffolk in England. While visiting the obscure towns and villages, his narrator weaves the highly digressive story, moving freely in time and space as his associations let him. The half-autobiographical, half-fictional style of narration is fascinating, simple, clear, elegant and minimalist, but imaginative and evocative. Sebald, with his erudite stories, sprouting from a view, small fragment of landscape, smell or mood, creates the atmosphere of melancholic solitude, but makes the reader feel united with the surrounding world and rooted in history. There is so much knowledge delivered in such a great style, that the writer can only be called great. His talent is beyond measure.
The stories of people and places, found here in astonishing detail, are intimate and warm, unraveling without judgement and always with a positive attitude. Sebald manages to bring obscurity back into light (the Mansion of Le Strange) or direct the reader's attention to the unknown aspects of the famous (the chapter about Joseph Conrad is an absolute masterpiece within a masterpiece). He moves freely from the local curiosities far in time and space: only in chapter 6, for example, from the bridge on the river Blyth he wanders to the details of the decline of the Chinese Empire after Opium Wars, the disappearance of a town over the cliff, and to the odd biography of the poet Swinburne.
The meditative quality of the prose is enhanced by lack of any experimental writing techniques. The only innovative, non- classical thing is the use of illustrations (photographs, drawings) as integral part of the book, as important as the text itself. The illustrations are very useful and add to the book's magic. Beware: it is hard to guess where the facts end and the fiction begins; what is real, and what is the mystification here? The guessing is a part of reading experience. Or: is it really necessary to guess, or is it enough just to immerse oneself in Sebald's world, no matter if it is real or invented. The comparisons with Borges are justified in terms of the imagination, but Sebald's prose is a lot less decorative, very ascetic. Interestingly, Sebald himself often refers to Borges in his narrative.
The beauty of Sebald's prose makes the readers want it to last into infinity and feel deprived, when the book ends. It may seem like a raving review, but I cannot praise Sebald enough and I recommend anyone who would like to start their adventure with this author to begin with "The Rings of Saturn". I would like to mention the great work of the translator, Michael Hulse - although I usually do not comment on translators, this was an amazing job, flawless and smooth, the reading felt absolutely natural. I will look for his name on other books translated from German.
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The night of time far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox? by H. Schneider (window seat) 5 Stars
April 27, 2008
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.
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Uncanny by Jane Grimes (Perth, Western Australia)  3 Stars
August 17, 2007
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
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A book of digressions and odd tangents by A Reader (San Francisco, California, USA)  4 Stars
July 09, 2007
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.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Vertigo
by Winfried Georg Sebald (Author), W. G. Sebald (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator)
Vertigo is the third novel New Directions has published by W.G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo, W.G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald -- the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness -- takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed...
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| The Emigrants
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Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US and sold out immediately in its first hardcover edition, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at...
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| On the Natural History of Destruction (Modern Library Paperbacks)
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During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany’s cultural memory? On the Natural History of Destruction probes deeply into this ominous...
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