The Rings of Saturn

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It’s at this point I have to confess that the past 12 months have been a year of my own miserable thinking. Perhaps that’s why I disappeared so readily into The Rings of Saturn. But rather than reinforcing my mood, I found solace in Sebald’s. It may be despondent and worn down but it is not cynical, it is not blind to beauty and, at its heart, it carries an invigorating dedication to truth. All of which should perhaps inspire me to establish whether I really did go to Southwold when I was young and, if I did, what the food was like. Recently, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a series of five fifteen-minute audio essays from people who knew Sebald (or Max, as he preferred to be called—he hated his first name, Winfried, because he felt that it sounded too much like the woman’s name Winnifred). Contributors include his English translator Anthea Bell, the poet George Szirtes, and the academic and novelist Christopher Bigsby, a colleague of Sebald’s at the University of East Anglia. W.G. Sebald is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where he lived. [20] Themes and style [ edit ] Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 162. The works of Jorge Luis Borges, especially " The Garden of Forking Paths" and " Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", were a major influence on Sebald. (Tlön and Uqbar appear in The Rings of Saturn.) [27] In a conversation during his final year, Sebald named Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean Paul as his literary models. [28] He also credited the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard as a major influence on his work, [29] and paid homage within his work to Kafka [30] and Nabokov (the figure of Nabokov appears in every one of the four sections of The Emigrants). [31] Memorials [ edit ] Sebaldweg ("Sebald Way") [ edit ]

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (z-lib.org The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (z-lib.org

Sebald could be describing his own peculiar nineteenth-century German prose style when he writes in Rings of Thomas Browne:And since the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature, Browne scrutinises that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths. That purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus—what does it mean?

The Rings of Saturn opens on to a dizzy range of allusions

it’s a form of prose fiction. I imagine it exists more frequently on the European continent than in the Anglo-Saxon world, i.e., dialogue plays hardly any part at all. Everything is related round various corners in a periscopic sort of way. In that sense it doesn’t conform to the patterns that standard fiction has established… But what exactly to call it, I don’t know.

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The irretrievability of the past turns out to be the main subject of the long conversation that takes place during the narrator’s visit to Michael Hamburger. Hamburger describes to him how, many years after the war, he had returned to Berlin and gone to the building where his parents had had their apartment, a building where the plasterwork garlands, the familiar railing, the names on the mailboxes—many of which, Hamburger notes, have not changed—now appear to him Update: As Geoff Dyer gently but firmly points out below, my remark about Sebald’s influence on his work is pretty roundly contradicted by the chronology of publication. Sebald’s “The Emigrants” didn’t appear in English until 1996, by which point Dyer had published “The Missing of the Somme” and had finished writing “Out of Sheer Rage.” The latter book in particular was on my mind when I mentioned Dyer’s being “inspired” by Sebald. I have to come out with my hands up on this point: what I initially described as Sebald’s influence on Dyer is much closer to an affinity, and perhaps has more to do with the shared influence of Thomas Bernhard. (As Dyer points out in his comment, he wrote “Out of Sheer Rage” during a period of “chronic Bernhard addiction”.) c]ould be used [in classrooms] to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration. Sebald was also the author of three books of poetry: For Years Now with Tess Jaray (2001), After Nature (1988), and Unrecounted (2004).

Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust

Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 166. You drive fast,’ Engelhard says. His face is windswept and slightly burnt. The afternoon is hot but the air is fresh. I shrug. ‘But you look well,’ he adds, grabbing my hand. I follow as he lumbers along the thin path to the small stone cottage, aware for the first time of the fragility of his gait. ‘We have planted all of these just this summer,’ he says, making a circular gesture. ‘They are all native. This is why I need to be here so often lately – to water the new plants.’ He breathes labouriously as we walk, but there is something playful in his expression. He seems keen to show me around. Sebald’s model-maker is in fact based on a real person, an Englishman named Alec Garrard who spent thirty years working on a 1:100 scale model of the Temple. But it is hard not to think that if Garrard hadn’t existed, Sebald would have had to make him up. The unfinishable model of the Temple is the perfect symbol of Sebald’s manner as well as of his subject, both of which are aligned with the pessimistic model of narrative, Erich Auerbach’s “Hebrew” style, which derives its uncanny power and devastating realism precisely from that which cannot be represented.But the labyrinth is not without its pleasures: otherworldly beauty, strangely stimulating coincidence, and of course, magnificently evocative prose are abundant in The Rings of Saturn and provide necessary contrast. As Sebald explained to Silverblatt: This becomes both a jumping off point for a descriptive essay on Swinburne, one of these poets, and, I think, perhaps a way for Sebald to analyze his own motives in undertaking a journey similar to men of a very different age, with quite different priorities and sensibilities. What is it that attracted them? stands in for "Why am I here?"

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald | Goodreads

W. G. Sebald is a German writer long resident in England. He has written poetry, criticism, and over the last decade or so, three novels, for which he has been rewarded several prestigious German literary prizes. The Rings of Saturn, just published in English translation, is his most recent book. An earlier work, The Emigrants, appeared in this country two years ago, when it was greeted in almost rapturous fashion. Though later, visiting a panoramic depiction of the battle of Waterloo, this remove becomes an object of moral scrutiny: Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh (eds.). W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2005. And dear higher power of choice, have paragraph breaks offended Sebald at some point? I assume he does not need to take a breath when talking or writing, but I need it when reading, and wall-to-wall text is not so conducive to that purpose. Same with quotation marks, actually. Jose Saramago has met his match.Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. While the narrator initially informs us, ‘I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast,’ this is not the impression we have of the narrator’s trek while reading The Rings of Saturn. What is published is far from carefree. Sebald writes: The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of course. I was a fervent model-maker in my early teenage years, often devoting all of my after-school time to making intricate reproductions of buildings from antiquity. Of these, the Parthenon was the object of an almost obsessive interest. After making my first model of it for a class project when I was about twelve, using cardboard toilet paper rolls to stand in for the original’s elegantly fluted Doric columns, I embarked on creating a proper scale model, three feet wide by six feet long, the ambitiousness of which now strikes me as almost absurd and the construction of which was never completed, although it absorbed the next five years of my life. During that period my skills improved. I studied dozens of books and, eventually, created elaborate rubber molds from which I could cast the forty-six columns of the peristyle and other architectural elements. I reproduced as meticulously as I was able the bas-reliefs of the frieze, which I worked in Plasticine on inch-high strips of cardboard, and the great chryselephantine statue of Athena, which in my three-feet-to-an-inch scale rendering was thirteen inches high, cast in plaster, and adorned with real gold leaf. Fa venire in mente un appassionato rigattiere che si muove nel suo negozio pieno di carabattole, ma per lui gioielli preziosi, cose di altri, e di tutto conosce la storia, il percorso, la vita. Lungo il cammino gli capita di pensare a La lezione di anatomia del dottor Tulp che Rembrandt dipinse nel 1632: ci porta dentro lo stupendo quadro, ci aiuta a ‘leggerlo’, a guardarlo – anche se poi a me sembra che prenda una cantonata, erudita, ma sempre di cantonata si tratta, non c’è nessuna confusione tra destra e sinistra nella tela, e se proprio di ‘errori’ si vuol parlare, è altrove che bisogna cercare.