The Rings of Saturn (1995)

rather boring and detached, occasionally fascinating snippets ( )

A mesmerising, tone perfect, marvellously digressive account of a semi-finctional walk through a semi-fictional landscape. ( )

Here is a long quote, and maybe I am wrong to do this because it comes near the end, but so be it:

"We talked about the deserted, soundless month of August. For weeks, said Michael, there is not a bird to be seen. It is as if everything was somehow hollowed out. Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even sheets of paper on which one endeavours to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while we intuitively know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

And, on the same page: "Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one's own precursor." ( )

how to describe? - real and unreal, strange and believable ( )

I had already intended to read The Rings of Saturn after my LT friend Janet* read and reviewed it last year, saying among other things, that if she had become a writer, this was how she would have wanted to write. Her praise bumped it up my list considerably. Somehow Janet was very much in my mind as I read occasionally making it hard not to feel quite emotional. For the book is about loss and change, about the way things and people and events are intertwined and overlapped and connected in eerie and unexpected ways - which you find out the minute you begin to explore anything in depth. As a result I found myself spending hours on line, looking at photographs of Dunwich, the town along the Suffolk (I think) coast of many churches, for a short while a major port, that began to be eaten by the sea in the 13th century until it was altogether given up on in the 19th. Or reading about Edward FitzGerald the first translator into English of the Rubaiyat or the story behind the story of Roger Casement, put to death for his part in the Irish Rebellion. Sebald walked about this area of the English coast extensively and the book is put together as one long walk, and perhaps the bones of it were this one long walk in 1995, but almost everywhere he goes he either says or implies that he has been there before. To return though, to the threads (a significant word choice, as one of the constant subjects is trade, weaving, silk cultivation) is violence and loss from this stems a sense of his sorrow at finding these themes everywhere, even in his adopted land, England. The war and all of the Nazi horrors are a dark theme, an undercurrent running through the text - surfacing here and there, as in the description of a Major LeStrange, who never recovered from being one of the first to witness the Belsen camp, and ended up leading an utterly eccentric and isolated life. Sebald resonates and identifies with this area which has changed beyond recognition in this age - no more windmills, no more grand estates, no more silk cultivation and weaving..... indeed..... no more anything really, not even trees after the terrible hurricane of 1987. You get a sense of an abandoned part of England, in a fallow and unused time of its long history, of people, that, at least for now, nobody values. In the final pages you even get a whiff, no more than the lightest silken-winged suggestion of one way the Nazis in their maniacally orderly way may have come up with how to eradicate the peoples they did not care for, in the same sterile and serene and 'scientific' way they killed the larvae in the silkworm - an unbelievably chilling moment.....

I'm making the book sound too sad to even think of reading, but it doesn't feel that way at all, in fact it is insanely beautiful and thought-provoking - Sebald's manner of writing is calm, thoughtful, and somehow both warm and detached, if that is possible. He admits being completely rattled when he gets lost on some labyrinthine pathways, for example, or shares the ghastly modern furniture in an otherwise beautiful and ancient inn, or a tramp on a roman road that ended up being strangely tedious (which sounds about right - any kind of rigidity does become tedious). *****

*Janet's review can be found a few comments below mine in the reviews - JanetinLondon. For those of you who do not know her, she died in early January this year.

**Here is a strange correspondance Sebald would have noted: I am 57 right now, Janet was 57 when she read Saturn (and maybe still was when she died, I don't know). Sebald was 57 when he died in a car crash.

I was mistaken about a few points in Sebald's life and have revised this review a little. ( )