The Rings of Saturn

Product Information

I never thought I was a goal-oriented reader (thanks, Justin, for giving words to that feeling I kept having when reading this book!) — and yet this book made me realize that apparently I am. Apparently, despite preaching that reading is about a journey, not a destination I hypocritically long for that journey to get somewhere, for the quest to have a goal, for the story to have something to be about. Don’t get me wrong - a bit of digression is always wonderful, and I’ll quote Salinger’s eternal rebel Holden Caulfield here just to show that I *get* it: “Oh, I don’t know. That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.” This is, in a way, also what Sebald is up to. His remembrance of his walk through Suffolk is essentially a series of mini-essays, digging up archeological memories from his own mind and the landscape he sees around him, fading in and out of the present sometimes as often as he turns his head for a better view. The subjects of these digressions range from a straightforward history of a formerly glorious manor home he comes across on his first walk, a discussion of Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness fame, inspired by the tragic case of Roger Casement, the sad tale of formerly bustling, repeatedly washed out Dunwich, an isolated craftsman working on a famous, minute replica of the Temple at Jerusalem, a sketched portrait of Swinburne and tales of the last days of the Chinese empire. The essay are sometimes analytical in tone, sometimes they take the form of a New Yorker-like story with commentary interspersed, and occasionally we are even offered scenes of drama or fanciful feeling. Sebald detaches us from reality, even as he feeds increasing amounts of earthy and apparently true material into the book. He makes us feel like there is far more in the Suffolk landscape than we could ever have imagined – and also that he’s imagining plenty of it. Or rather, the imaginary version of him is imagining it. C’è un viandante che negli anni Novanta del secolo scorso se ne va a piedi attraverso la contea di Suffolk, in East Anglia, che non è proprio il primo posto che viene voglia di visitare nel Regno Unito di Gran Bretagna (è però il primo posto da dove partivano gli aerei alleati che andavano a bombardare a tappeto la Germania nazista, come racconta lo stesso Sebald in Storia naturale della distruzione).

Austerlitz is to some extent anomalous among Sebald’s novels precisely because of its explicit mention of the German extermination of the Jews of Europe, which haunts his other narratives without ever quite being made explicit. To my knowledge there is only one time in Sebald’s work that the word holocaust occurs, and there it refers not to what Germany did to the Jews but to what, in the Book of Genesis, Abraham intends to do to Isaac. In a typically digressive passage in The Rings of Saturn, which indeed consists of nothing but digressions, a series of tales that both describe and mirror its narrator’s meandering walks around the East Coast of England during a period of inexplicable depression, the narrator muses on the 1658 work by Thomas Browne called Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, whose discussion of how easy it is to burn human bodies is paraphrased at one point:Miller, A. D. (Spring 2011). "Notes on a Voice: W. G. Sebald". Intelligent Life . Retrieved 9 June 2013. Sebald’dan okuduğum bu dördüncü kitap (Vertigo, Hava Savaşı ve Edebiyat, Kır Evinde İkamet) bence en iyisi. Lütfen okuyun. Is that enough? Need I go on? What more could I say? More images? a longer list of the subjects, none really profound most would judge, which our narrator, presumably pictured below, with one of his own grainy photos [p. 264], Buddy read with Justin, whose much more favorable review from which I stole the “goal-oriented reader” line is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... The past few years have seen me walking quite a bit when I can. No longer walking for its functionality, to get from A to B, but rather as a necessity. I don’t quite feel whole when I am not able to get out there (which explains, at least partially, why I don’t feel whole in the ever-present Canadian winters, where your very breath freezes in front of your face – not much of a chance to walk then). I usually walk the same paths, a trusted 3 or 4 which I hit with tried and true regularity. Perhaps because the paths are so much a part of my DNA, I don’t often take the time to be mindfully present. As I read The Rings of Saturn, however, I felt the constant need to stop and look at each and every single tree in my path, perhaps attempting to link the path around it to a memory of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, or Robertson Davies. Perhaps, in doing so, I would be able to connect words and memories with a barely tangible gossamer bridge, referring to a character that one of these Canadian authors had come across in their lives. Then I would be able to delve in, deeper, more persistently, uncovering something in the lives of these other characters that would point to the destructive force apparent in our lives in 2023, cultures grinding to a halt, communities in turmoil, agreement and disagreement irrelevant.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.” Aș mai menționa că textul lui Sebald este întrerupt de numeroase fotografii greu descifrabile (așa e și în original, din cîte am văzut), de tăieturi din ziare, de hărți etc. E greu de găsit o unitate în Inelele lui Saturn, principiul narativ este asociația aproape liberă de idei, digresiunea. Cred că este singurul lucru care evocă obiceiurile lui Sterne: „Stînd acum să mă mai gîndesc, îmi vine în minte faptul că pe vremuri...” (p.300).Sulla spiaggia guardata dall’alto gli sembra di vedere un grosso mollusco che gli suscita un panico improvviso: ma la minuziosa descrizione lascia intendere che si tratta di una coppia intenta a fare l’amore fino al raggiungimento dell’orgasmo - e qui forse il voyerismo del nostro riceve il suo giusto premio (o punizione, se si preferisce). From Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate , by Daniel Mendelsohn, published in September by University of Virginia Press. The first time I read this book I was baffled, frustrated but equally in awe. I'd never read anything like it, which was the case for a lot of people. Publishers apparently hated Sebald's books as much as they loved them because they couldn't decide where to shelve him. I have never been much of a re-reader but recently I discovered the beauty of it. My reading is almost entirely critical past a first reading, and I am learning far more about the books (and the craft itself); and yet, reading Sebald critically is still far more difficult than many other writers. For one, there are certain questions that simply cannot be answered: How is the prose so seductive/entrancing? How, even when talking about historical atrocities, is there that wry, sly, subtle humour just under the surface of every line? How does the structure of the novel work, how does he entwine all these thoughts into a working and coherent narrative? And speaking of narrative, what is Sebald’s narrative here? Like Pynchon’s parabola, it’s quite clear that Sebald’s structure is quite simply the rings of Saturn: he has exploded the connection between memory and time with the circular rings of the planet. Beyond the maze, shadows were drifting across the brume of the heath, and then, one by one, the stars came out from the depths of space. Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand. From my resting place in the pavilion I gazed out across the heath into the night. And I saw that, to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves. So it turned out that I was going to get round to reading more Sebald (after Austerlitz, over three years ago), and it was going to be this one. And, unlike Austerlitz, which is incontrovertibly a novel, to read this was to experience the ur-text of what's meant by Sebaldian: vast, controlled digression, the lists, the descriptions, melancholic polymathic butterfly flitting from global to local history; travel writing, memoir, nature, biography (especially of fellow eccentrics with diverse interests: he begins and ends with Sir Thomas Browne). Not long ago I watched the film Patience (After Sebald) and in it, I think it was Christopher Maclehose recounting a conversation with Sebald, during which they discussed which topic categories his book would be given in publishing databases, and WGS said "I want all the categories!"