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Loading... The Rings of Saturnby W. G. Sebald
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I didn't enjiy this book at al. I couldn't see the point in it. It seemed to be about someone wandering around the coutryside on the east coast of England with no particular porpose or reason, reminiscing and dreaming about past eras and imaginary situations. There wasn't much wrong with the writing except he used a fair few words i didn't know, but it didn't really strike me as great or beautiful either. (  )1   MarkKeeffe | Aug 17, 2009 |  elusive, beautiful. star with the emmigrants, then the rings of saturn. (  ) nadiart | Aug 13, 2009 | This is one of those books, where you don’t dislike the book, but not sure if you like it either. On one hand, Sebald is a very talented author. He is good at description, and using words to draw the reader in, and keep them interested in the story. And the idea behind the novel and how it was approached was also well done, and very unique, it really was unlike any other book I’ve read. Having a walking tour of England and being told the history/small stories behind it and what he sees during his tour. But, something just falls short in this part for me, the story and the “history” just didn’t interest me enough to make me really enjoy the book. I think what kept me reading was Sebald’s writing style and story telling abilities, or potential. One of the positives of the book is that it has made me want to look at more of his work and see his true potential. Not a bad book, but its not a book I’d give much thought to now that it’s finished. Review can also be found on my book review blog: http://juliebooks.blogspot.com/2009/0... (  ) bookwormjules | May 7, 2009 | I found this book next to a big blue recycling bin while walking to work one morning. It's probably the best thing I've ever found. Little did I then realize how lucky it was that I stopped to see what someone had thrown out. I can only imagine that its owner had died and some cretin of a relative was rummaging through her things looking for something he could cash in on, and he ignorantly dumped this great book in that clean alley, thinking it of no use to him. But I rescued it from disposal. It's the only book I've ever read that I immediately began reading over again the moment I finished it. What a treasure trove of detail it contains, all woven together with one long fortuitous thread of glorious silk. How odd it is, while reading these strange, wonderful stories of loss and doom, to have the foreknowledge of Sebald's own impending death that took place so tragically soon after the book's publication. It's almost as if his own fast-approaching obituary also looms over the pages -- and so appropriately so, given everything contained within. Be on the lookout for discarded jewels. ( )1 UinzatoMone | May 5, 2009 | This book is really unlike anything else I have read. It's a novel which may be as accurate as any non-fiction account. Sebald recounts a walking tour he takes in England. His meandering is mirrored by ruminations on other stories--both true and imagined. Visiting the port where Conrad left for Africa sends Sebald on a long remembrance of that visit and its effect on Conrad and his work. The narrative is full of interesting tidbits (such as that Conrad's successor in Africa was an uncle of Kafka's) that lead Sebald onto other stories. Most often, though, he returns to Thomas Browne and his melancholy descriptions of burial urns and other artifacts from early civilizations on the British isles. If The Rings of Saturn can be said to be about anything, it is about memory and how it makes all things its own. In a curious, almost magical, way Sebald makes all the other stories that he tells a part of his own. When he visits a man attempting to make an exact replica of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem (based on the latest archaeological and Biblical scholarship), the man's story becomes Sebald's story. This is true not just in a metaphorical sense (building the temple paralleling building a novel), but in a real sense where just as the man's model is both all-consuming and always incomplete, so is Sebald's construction of his memories. Sebald's use of photographs in the book is in a sense a way of concretizing his memories, just as the modeler makes scholarship into reality. The novel is also often beautifully written (Michael Hulse gets some credit for conveying that beauty in his translation). I find this book to be much better than Vertigo, which I also liked very much. It is definitely worth reading. ( )1 wrmjr66 | Jan 5, 2009 | 
 The Rings of Saturn, perplexing, turgid, and unreadable book that it so frequently is, is saddled with a problem it cannot resolve or even address: that of the dislodged identity.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0811214133, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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