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Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald
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Rings of Saturn (original 1995; edition 1999)

by W G Sebald (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,290823,964 (4.17)148
Nobody can accuse me of not trying to understand the appeal of WGS to so many trustworthy readers, but for the life of me, I can't come up with a good reason for his popularity. This review is a really a group review of 'Rings,' 'Emigrants,' 'Campo Santo,' and and Lynn Sharon Schwartz's 'The Emergence of Memory.' I'm putting it under 'Rings,' because this is certainly the best book of Sebald's that I read.

I've asked people why they think Sebald is popular. One fairly broad response was: his work was translated at the perfect moment. He wrote 'interstitial' or genre-blurring books just when everyone was getting into blurring genres, and so he gave a kind of imprimatur to that form. I can accept this on the level of "how did Sebald get his start in English," since it's a nice hook.

I'm not sure how well it explains individual readers' experiences, though. Yes, a few David Shields types might really enjoy the 'reality' of the books, the way they use novelistic techniques but lack novelistic tropes. If you're the kind of person who wants to read, but doesn't like novels or essays, Sebald might just hit a sweet spot.

Although I don't like the idea, I fear that a lot of people like these books because of their content. In Sebald's work, all roads lead towards the Shoah, but asymptotically. We're forever just missing the event, getting traces of it, seeing its effects. In one particularly silly instance, Sebald describes the history of silk-worm farming in Germany, and links that directly to Nazism. The same thing, we're given to understand, is true of herring fishing.

The point of all this, he tells us in Campo Santo and Emergence of Memory, is to show up the "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the holocaust in small-town Germany. Sebald finds it appalling that ordinary people can go about their lives as if Nazism and genocide never happened, that they prefer not to talk about it, and so it is. However, he doesn't think one can just discuss the events openly. Instead, one must get there through indirection.

This is a fairly standard modernist strategy, but Sebald literalises it in (what I find to be) a particularly dull way. Beckett, for instance, can be read as indirectly pointing to any number of 20th century horrors, but he does it by abstraction and humor. Sebald tries to be indirect in a far simpler way: he just doesn't talk about what he obviously wants to talk about. And given the omnipresence of the holocaust in late twentieth century cultural life, that's the right choice.

But it also points to a problem with the project as a whole: Sebald's books appeal mostly to the cultured, who, if anything, over-discuss the holocaust, which has the effect of distracting attention from all the other injustices that are *currently* taking place. And, I suspect, Sebald knew this very well, which explains his thinking in "Natural History of Destruction." His method is to write in the teeth of a conspiracy of silence, but there simply *is no* conspiracy of silence around the Shoah. So he moves on to a different, far less offensive conspiracy--this time, the German literati's unwillingness to deal with the destruction of German cities in the second world war.

Again, though, an English speaking audience is unlikely to believe in this conspiracy: Slaughterhouse 5, to take only one example, has dealt with the theme in a suitably indirect but also direct manner. 'Natural History' has been criticized for insensitivity--how could WGS deal with these matters, knowing that the destruction was the direct result of Nazi actions? It's almost as if he's been accused of a conspiracy of silence over the holocaust. And so the cycle continues.

Some readers might value oblique reminders that the holocaust and Luftkrieg took place, but I suspect that anyone who gets something from the content of Sebald's work has something else in mind: its comfortable pessimism.

"It is a characteristic of our species," he says, "in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair." This is arrant nonsense, at almost every turn: 'evolutionarily,' it is obviously false; that we are a species in despair is obviously false, and so on. But late-Victorian pessimism has always attracted the comfortably off intellectual. With no God to demand that we act well towards each other, and no poverty forcing us to act well for ourselves, we're left in an extremely boring spot. But we can think about that spot at great length, at least, and thus face up to the abyss that we have created twice over--once in that the cost of our comfort is actual suffering for the poor, and second in that the 'despair' Sebald writes of is just self-aggrandizing melancholy masquerading as deep insight, the kind of insight that greatly appeals to readers of literature. We know very little about history, or even the present, and we prefer not to learn about it. What we want is the experience of being ourselves.

As for the sentences, lavishly beloved, I see nothing special:

"After I had taken my leave of William Hazel I walked for a good hour along the country road from Somerleyton to Lowestoft, passing Blundeston prison, which rises out of the flatland like a fortified town and keeps within its walls twelve-hundred inmates at any one time."

Reviewers often praise Sebald as bringing back the nineteenth century, and this sentence (chosen as random, which is unfair, but I can't go through them all) confirms that claim: it is bloated and falsely colloquial ("taken my leave", "good hour"); it is cliched ("rises out of") and it is bombastic ("keeps within its walls"). His (or his translators') vocabulary is deeply impoverished; everything is "in decline," everything is "ruined." The syntax of the translations is often Germanic for no very good reason (in the 'we for twenty minutes walked along the black but also reflecting light with small flakes of bright material road' way), and that, I suspect is just bad translation.

All of which is to say that if Sebald's books have any worth, it is in their formal features rather than their almost vapid content. And his meandering, coincidence, essayistic prose is unusual for its time period, and unusual in a way worth preserving. Unfortunately, readers of 17th or even 18th century writers won't find his work anywhere near as 'innovative,' 'strange' or 'original,' as so many reviewers do. Sebald himself, I think, wouldn't make such claims: why else describe Browne at such length? In any case, Sebald's books are all, essentially, extended essays of the Montaignian type, wandering from one topic to the other, but modernist in their self-consciousness. The wandering is always around one point, the moments each reflect that point. Like Montaigne, the essays don't develop; like Burton, the essays are all about one thing (the abyss, though, rather than melancholy); like, say, Adorno, the essays are tightly constructed despite the appearance of randomness.

So my long winding decline-filled journey through the ruins ends in puzzlement and anger and acceptance: puzzlement because I honestly do not understand why so many people find Sebald worthy of so much praise; anger because I suspect his popularity rests on a dull but attractive pessimism that should really be dealt with in a church, temple, or mosque rather than indulged by art; and acceptance because, if nothing else, Sebald's form could be used by others in the future to better effect.

But for now his influence seems to be the most malignant part of his work, throwing up the puerilities of Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, David Shields, Rachel Cusk's 'Outline,' and so on. Just reciting this family tree makes me think better of WG, who at least took an interest in something other than himself. ( )
1 vote stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
English (71)  Dutch (4)  Spanish (1)  Catalan (1)  Polish (1)  German (1)  All languages (79)
Showing 1-25 of 71 (next | show all)
This was a very original, unusual and captivating book and my first venture into Sebald. The narrator takes us on a walking tour around Suffolk county on the east coast of England, while giving us a history lesson in related local and foreign events and sharing with us his inner thoughts and reflections. The text is interspersed with bad grainy photos, which makes the whole experience very sureal. He finds a seamless way of bridging between his perception of the physical surroundings and his musings on historical topics, whether it’s the decline of the local seaside economy, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, the demise of the local herring industry, or sericulture in Norwich. His diversity of topics is never muddled and Sebald finds a natural almost dreamlike way to beautifully transition from one topic to the next. It’s almost like a tour of his mind.

His central theme seems to be somewhat nostalgic and poignant, one of decay, nothing is permanent and ultimately everything dies:

“ ... nothing endures, in Thomas Browne’s view. On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. ... There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time ... Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air.”

Sebald’s lyrical prose has a poetic ring to it and is some of the most enjoyable I have read in a long time.

“And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past.”

I really enjoyed this book. Despite the unusual narrative and seemingly endless range of topics, I was fully immersed and never bored. It just naturally flows. Highly recommended.

( )
  amurray914 | Feb 27, 2024 |
Benché questo libro sia da molti considerato l'apice di Sebald, io lo metto al secondo posto pari merito rispetto alle mie letture, insieme a Vertigini e dietro a un'altra coppia pari merito, Gli emigrati e Austerlitz, peraltro letti in questo ordine. A Vertigini questo libro somiglia per la natura più legata legata alle divagazioni, laddove gli altri due libri li ho apprezzati, oltre che credo per un maggiore fattore di novità, per la struttura narrativa più coerente e coesa, pur conservando tutte le caratteristiche della scrittura di Sebald, incluso l'utilizzo delle immagini. A ogni modo, lettura preziosa, e consigliabile a tutti, al di là di come e dove si posiziona nel mio percorso. Di Sebald trovo apprezzabile soprattutto la capacità di muoversi liberamente e al tempo stesso profondamente, peregrinando da un luogo all'altro, da una suggestione all'altra.

"Eppure, che cosa saremmo mai senza il ricordo? Non saremmo in grado di mettere ordine nemmeno tra i pensieri più semplici, il cuore più ardente perderebbe la capacità di volgersi con simpatia a un altro, la nostra esistenza consisterebbe soltanto in una successione infinita di momenti privi di senso, e non vi sarebbe più traccia di un qualche passato. Che miseria, la nostra vita!" ( )
  d.v. | May 16, 2023 |
sections 1 through 4 are exceptional (in decreasing order). in the discussion of Joseph Conrad, and in later sections, the attempt at presenting a historicized pathos is too explicit. ( )
  Joe.Olipo | Nov 26, 2022 |
From a distance the most distinctive feature of the sixth planet from the sun in our solar system is a set of rings consisting of debris from some previously circulating body which, due to some unknown cataclysm, disintegrated. The remains of this ancient event, the rings, are evident even though the event itself is lost to us. So too, one might say, the debris of humanity’s interactions, which themselves are lost in the fog of time, nonetheless continue to encircle us, and might, from a distance also be our most distinctive feature. Following the traces in the past of present objects or events affords the opportunity to ruminate upon the unravelling of our various hopes and plans. Which might be a fair characterization of grief.

Ostensibly following a walking route down the Norfolk coast, the narrator’s thoughts roam much further in space across the whole of the known world and in time across hundreds of years of our history. The connections, like threads in a complex tapestry, are sometimes surprising, more often poignant. But throughout, a kind of melancholy nearly overwhelms the writing. This is by design.

Sebald’s writing is so measured and gentle, thoughtful and carefully constructed, that the paragraphs of sometimes many pages slip by seemingly without effort. But the tremendous amount of research necessary to accommodate such fluid writing about disparate events must almost go without saying, because contemplating it would make the work seem too large to tackle. Yet when it ends, you’ll feel as though you barely scratched the surface of what might have been said. Fascinating.

Highly recommended. ( )
  RandyMetcalfe | Nov 2, 2022 |
This was like going for a walk with a friend. A really clever, informed, interested and interesting friend. Wonderful and moving. I didn't want it to end. ( )
  missizicks | Oct 29, 2022 |
I've left this a while before writing a review, but I still can't make up my mind. Parts of it have undoubtedly stayed with me, which should raise it from my initial three stars. Yet it still has the feel of musty cheap British hotels, poor food, and dreich weather. The interest is away from UK's shores, which is perhaps the point for a journey within the UK. I'll have to reread at some point; after at least a year or two. ( )
  ortgard | Sep 22, 2022 |
Reason read; August botm reading 1001
Completed 9/2, this is a story that is written as a travel journal which includes not only descriptions of areas (generally walked, boat or other rides) of various areas but also historical information. It starts in August, how fitting for August botm. It covers grief, black, mourning rituals, silk and of destruction as a process of time. Definitely a book worth a reread. ( )
  Kristelh | Sep 2, 2022 |
Now to read it again. ( )
  katefren | Aug 15, 2022 |
An odd book: sort of a highbrow version of [b:A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail|9791|A Walk in the Woods Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail|Bill Bryson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388189974s/9791.jpg|613469]. The author takes a walking tour of the English seaside, visiting fellow writers and musing over the history of the area, its inhabitants, and its industries.

Unlike with Bryson's tale, however, the walking tour seems aimless and almost disjointed. This is not the tale of a walk, and the journey often seems incidental. Instead, the reader is presented with a long, rambling recollection to accompany each long, rambling walk.

The effect is not unpleasant, once the reader gets used to it, and many of the topics are quite interesting. ( )
  mkfs | Aug 13, 2022 |
Fascinating but meandering to the point of distraction. There's a lot to be learned/gained/gleaned from this singular travelogue, but I often felt like I was trudging through it rather than enjoying it. I'll probably read it again because there are some exquisite descriptions and intricacies of narrative weaving, but I don't think I'll be up for it again for a long, long time. ( )
  liannecollins | Jun 10, 2022 |
deeply fascinating and emotional, very good book ( )
  sn_fk_n | May 15, 2022 |
what if a really long mental floss article had depression? or, what if montaigne was like drinking a bottle of liquid soap instead of like eating a hearty meal? DNF ( )
  schumacherrr | Feb 21, 2022 |
A most beautiful scrapbook, a wormhole of memories, a way to trap the mind in a maze which delights it. This travel story is joy-killing at the same time it brings a quiet humor to everything, even the most dead of ends, the most morose ruins and the agentless way they fall from their height and grace. Sebald shows how everything is destroyed through the agency of human cruelty, human inattention, and the will of nature.
“Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally even heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound.”
It is these descriptions, and the photos, and the winding topics, and the impossibility and needlessness of getting a straight-on look at the narrator (a true fictional travel narrative if I've ever seen one) that give this book the invisible scaffolding for which it deserves the abundant praise it has received. ( )
1 vote et.carole | Jan 21, 2022 |
Had no idea what to expect of this book, neither genre nor anything else, as I bought it to read alongside Rob MacFarlane's twitter reading group #TheReadingsofSaturn #TRoS, and may have vaguely thought it would be science fiction! Dreamlike, hypnotic, and wonderful to read alongside the twitter group contributions. I was thrilled by how it intersected with everyday life. For example Sebald mentions Southwold and immediately Southwold comes up in completely unrelated contexts. Particularly serendipitous was the evening I read the last chapter (heavy on silk) having been eating black mulberry fruits that afternoon under a mulberry tree at Calke Abbey. ( )
  Ma_Washigeri | Jan 23, 2021 |
iv, v, vi

-> history that touch places that touch people who've been to places in -> ( )
  stravinsky | Dec 28, 2020 |
Nobody can accuse me of not trying to understand the appeal of WGS to so many trustworthy readers, but for the life of me, I can't come up with a good reason for his popularity. This review is a really a group review of 'Rings,' 'Emigrants,' 'Campo Santo,' and and Lynn Sharon Schwartz's 'The Emergence of Memory.' I'm putting it under 'Rings,' because this is certainly the best book of Sebald's that I read.

I've asked people why they think Sebald is popular. One fairly broad response was: his work was translated at the perfect moment. He wrote 'interstitial' or genre-blurring books just when everyone was getting into blurring genres, and so he gave a kind of imprimatur to that form. I can accept this on the level of "how did Sebald get his start in English," since it's a nice hook.

I'm not sure how well it explains individual readers' experiences, though. Yes, a few David Shields types might really enjoy the 'reality' of the books, the way they use novelistic techniques but lack novelistic tropes. If you're the kind of person who wants to read, but doesn't like novels or essays, Sebald might just hit a sweet spot.

Although I don't like the idea, I fear that a lot of people like these books because of their content. In Sebald's work, all roads lead towards the Shoah, but asymptotically. We're forever just missing the event, getting traces of it, seeing its effects. In one particularly silly instance, Sebald describes the history of silk-worm farming in Germany, and links that directly to Nazism. The same thing, we're given to understand, is true of herring fishing.

The point of all this, he tells us in Campo Santo and Emergence of Memory, is to show up the "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the holocaust in small-town Germany. Sebald finds it appalling that ordinary people can go about their lives as if Nazism and genocide never happened, that they prefer not to talk about it, and so it is. However, he doesn't think one can just discuss the events openly. Instead, one must get there through indirection.

This is a fairly standard modernist strategy, but Sebald literalises it in (what I find to be) a particularly dull way. Beckett, for instance, can be read as indirectly pointing to any number of 20th century horrors, but he does it by abstraction and humor. Sebald tries to be indirect in a far simpler way: he just doesn't talk about what he obviously wants to talk about. And given the omnipresence of the holocaust in late twentieth century cultural life, that's the right choice.

But it also points to a problem with the project as a whole: Sebald's books appeal mostly to the cultured, who, if anything, over-discuss the holocaust, which has the effect of distracting attention from all the other injustices that are *currently* taking place. And, I suspect, Sebald knew this very well, which explains his thinking in "Natural History of Destruction." His method is to write in the teeth of a conspiracy of silence, but there simply *is no* conspiracy of silence around the Shoah. So he moves on to a different, far less offensive conspiracy--this time, the German literati's unwillingness to deal with the destruction of German cities in the second world war.

Again, though, an English speaking audience is unlikely to believe in this conspiracy: Slaughterhouse 5, to take only one example, has dealt with the theme in a suitably indirect but also direct manner. 'Natural History' has been criticized for insensitivity--how could WGS deal with these matters, knowing that the destruction was the direct result of Nazi actions? It's almost as if he's been accused of a conspiracy of silence over the holocaust. And so the cycle continues.

Some readers might value oblique reminders that the holocaust and Luftkrieg took place, but I suspect that anyone who gets something from the content of Sebald's work has something else in mind: its comfortable pessimism.

"It is a characteristic of our species," he says, "in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair." This is arrant nonsense, at almost every turn: 'evolutionarily,' it is obviously false; that we are a species in despair is obviously false, and so on. But late-Victorian pessimism has always attracted the comfortably off intellectual. With no God to demand that we act well towards each other, and no poverty forcing us to act well for ourselves, we're left in an extremely boring spot. But we can think about that spot at great length, at least, and thus face up to the abyss that we have created twice over--once in that the cost of our comfort is actual suffering for the poor, and second in that the 'despair' Sebald writes of is just self-aggrandizing melancholy masquerading as deep insight, the kind of insight that greatly appeals to readers of literature. We know very little about history, or even the present, and we prefer not to learn about it. What we want is the experience of being ourselves.

As for the sentences, lavishly beloved, I see nothing special:

"After I had taken my leave of William Hazel I walked for a good hour along the country road from Somerleyton to Lowestoft, passing Blundeston prison, which rises out of the flatland like a fortified town and keeps within its walls twelve-hundred inmates at any one time."

Reviewers often praise Sebald as bringing back the nineteenth century, and this sentence (chosen as random, which is unfair, but I can't go through them all) confirms that claim: it is bloated and falsely colloquial ("taken my leave", "good hour"); it is cliched ("rises out of") and it is bombastic ("keeps within its walls"). His (or his translators') vocabulary is deeply impoverished; everything is "in decline," everything is "ruined." The syntax of the translations is often Germanic for no very good reason (in the 'we for twenty minutes walked along the black but also reflecting light with small flakes of bright material road' way), and that, I suspect is just bad translation.

All of which is to say that if Sebald's books have any worth, it is in their formal features rather than their almost vapid content. And his meandering, coincidence, essayistic prose is unusual for its time period, and unusual in a way worth preserving. Unfortunately, readers of 17th or even 18th century writers won't find his work anywhere near as 'innovative,' 'strange' or 'original,' as so many reviewers do. Sebald himself, I think, wouldn't make such claims: why else describe Browne at such length? In any case, Sebald's books are all, essentially, extended essays of the Montaignian type, wandering from one topic to the other, but modernist in their self-consciousness. The wandering is always around one point, the moments each reflect that point. Like Montaigne, the essays don't develop; like Burton, the essays are all about one thing (the abyss, though, rather than melancholy); like, say, Adorno, the essays are tightly constructed despite the appearance of randomness.

So my long winding decline-filled journey through the ruins ends in puzzlement and anger and acceptance: puzzlement because I honestly do not understand why so many people find Sebald worthy of so much praise; anger because I suspect his popularity rests on a dull but attractive pessimism that should really be dealt with in a church, temple, or mosque rather than indulged by art; and acceptance because, if nothing else, Sebald's form could be used by others in the future to better effect.

But for now his influence seems to be the most malignant part of his work, throwing up the puerilities of Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, David Shields, Rachel Cusk's 'Outline,' and so on. Just reciting this family tree makes me think better of WG, who at least took an interest in something other than himself. ( )
1 vote stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald What a strange book, both engaging and fascinating but so strange, it is like being in someone else's dream.
 
Good Book ( )
  Ken-Me-Old-Mate | Sep 24, 2020 |
The Rings of Saturn is so many things at once. Part travel documentation, part historical research, part novel, part ethereal stream-of-consciousness, and each part is executed superbly. The book ostensibly covers a short period of journey on-foot by Sebald in south-east England as he traces some of the history related to Thomas Browne, but it meanders and gets lost just as often as he does on the moors and plains of that area. The journey it takes us on is sublime. Each page is dripping with descriptions, sudden changes in course, and a type of exploratory and deeply engaged writing that is incomparable. This is my first time reading Sebald; I will be reading a lot more of him in future. ( )
  ephemeral_future | Aug 20, 2020 |
Really unlike anything else I've read; a dreamlike, melancholy travelogue/essay/meditation on loss, memory and history. I know the areas of Norfolk and Suffolk he visits reasonably well, growing up in the area, and he captures the coastline well - Dunwich and its unique eeriness in particular. A book I can see myself returning to in the future. ( )
  arewenotben | Jul 31, 2020 |
What a peculiar book. ( )
  AldusManutius | Jul 5, 2020 |
This is the kind of dreamlike reverie I really enjoy. It’s ostensibly a book about walking, a collection of historical notes, the product of the loom of memory applied to the history of Europe with special regard to the areas Sebald walked during a tour of England. It’s a beautiful reverie. ( )
  jtth | May 4, 2020 |
W.G.? More like W.T.F.

Sebald's fictional (?) walking tour in "The Rings of Saturn" is a pure curiosity and after finishing the book this evening I want to start it again. I'm intent on re-reading this one in the new year. At the risk of plagiarizing the quotes plastered on my edition this novel is REALLY like a dream, but of the intertwining natures of personal and cultural histories. The intersections or layering that one can experience in life if they are attuned and questions of madness and futility of singleminded pursuits. The language is at times obtuse and also gorgeous. That said, I really didn't get it, it's awesome, but I really didn't get it.

---
  b.masonjudy | Apr 3, 2020 |
After being very impressed by Austerlitz, I bought the Kindle version of the Rings of Saturn, which was on sale at a bargain price. First, I highly recommend reading Sebald's work on Kindle because he is fond of including untranslated foreign passages, in this case I recall there being French and Dutch. The ability to highlight them on the Kindle and have them translated is a lifesaver and much easier than having to type them in and look them up on a computer or a phone. The Kindle also works well for the black and white photographs included throughout the text (as in Austerlitz).

After reading Austerlitz, much of this book seems similar. Sebald is fascinated with history and with memory, especially how distant, unremembered memories affect us when we revisit the places those memories were formed. As in Austerlitz, Sebald is also an engaging writer, and here his paragraphs are not nearly as long! So - why the 2 1/2 star rating when I gave Austerlitz 4 1/2 stars? It is quite simple. Both are sold as works of fiction, but Austerlitz actually has a plot of sorts--a Jewish WW2 child sent to Britain's search later in his life for the truth and fate of his parents. This keeps the book moving forward, no matter how many digressions Sebald includes. But even the digressions in Austerlitz are connected to the two main threads of the story--the narrator's own mental journey and the story of the annihilation of Jews from Czechoslovakia. The Rings of Saturn has no such momentum. It is held together by a journey on foot through Somerset, but this is no quest or search for meaning. The narrator, who is very much like Sebald himself (and the protagonist in Austerlitz) provides depressing comments about the places he visits, nearly all of which saw their better days decades--if not centuries--ago. And he digresses into real people including Sir Thomas Browne, Chateaubriand, Edward FitzGerald, Michael Hamburger, a few other characters, and a whole host of atrocities, including WW2 Bosnia. Along the way, Sebald weaves in parts of Borges' tale of Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius. He also quotes freely from the those previously mentioned. I'm not sure what the point is. If I wanted to read history, I would be better off reading actual history so I could be sure of what are facts and what are Sebald's embellishments. For example, there was a man who built a model of the Temple of Jerusalem, but not the man in Sebald's book; Sebald apparently modeled the character after him.

And of course, if I wanted to read fiction, I could find a book with a plot. Which isn't to say that this was a total loss--it's never a total loss to spend time in the company of someone such as Sebald--but this kind of random musing can be more engaging and entertaining when done right, such as in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, which is a minor masterpiece.

After this, I'm uncertain about reading Sebald again. All of his work seems to be variations on a theme that I can enjoy a time or two but never learn to hum. ( )
  datrappert | Jul 28, 2019 |
The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and thesilk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants ." " ( )
  MichaelODullard | Apr 6, 2019 |
I read this twice, seperated by a most important decade. The second reading was in the early days of our new house. Terms like haunted are often misused, but there is a sense that Sebald elevates the ghosts of maladaption and legacy to a momentary viewing, however stilted.

New homes and a safely surveyed life often prove to be mixed wagers. Sebald grounds one in the quotidian. Even as he unnerves with a passing query, a nagging thorn of dissociation. Commerce and legacy are tainted. The inheritors bear the mark. As readers we remain cursed. So be it. ( )
  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |
Showing 1-25 of 71 (next | show all)

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