ISBN: 0811214133
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 3
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Summary: Langour, loss, loners
To a colleague who lent this book to me, I remarked that reading Rings, I felt at times as if I was peering into my own mind. Bibliophiles, introverts, eccentrics, and loners such as the narrator and his subjects provide the ideal audience for a book about stubborn individuals, largely focused around the Suffolk coast, who resist the tide, metaphorically and practically.
Languor permeates these pages. At times, the recitation of facts about Conrad and Casement, the plot of Borges' story on Tlon, or the history of silk manufacturing seemed too much potted or borrowed to engage me with whatever additional insights I'd have expected Sebald to enrich these anecdotes. More successful are his examinations of the eroding Lowescroft, the man with the Temple of Jerusalem model, and the fittingly named LeStrange. When Sebald reports more on the local rather than the otherwise known, his concentration improves and the book nourished by these more primary sources rather than secondhand summations.
Best of all is his account of a terrible storm and its aftermath, where the trees' denudation and the stars' reclamation of the blackout skies over this stretch of the coast make for gripping imagery. His passion emerges, albeit subtly, here, and his poetry on devastation made me want to seek out his last work, On the Natural History of Destruction. Tangentially, allusions to the earlier military obliteration are made in his reveries on the RAF base and its German targets, and no doubt readers of his more-German centered work will want to read his preparatory thinking, as it were, in the hauntingly titled--if you read the epigraph--Rings of Saturn. These, symbolically, are only discussed in this part of this unclassifiable memoir/novel.
Summary: Masterpiece for the ages
One of the great books of our time this is seemingly a random collection of thoughts, stories and rememberances, all written in Sebald's typical elliptical poetic almost hypnotic prose. Scratch under the surface however and you will find a deep philosophical meditation on memory and death and the beauty we can find in decay. In its own way this book reveals the sorry state of the novel by being simply a huge advance on that tired old form. It certainly doesnt feel like a novel but reads like a non fiction book but really it is beyond such defitnions of genre and rather it is a new catagory of literature upon which catchy names have yet to descend. This book along with Sebald's entire output will come to be seen as a key moment in the history of literature like that ushered by the publication of Ulysis.
Summary: The Rings of Saturn
The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald is one of the strangest and most sublime of books I have read in a long time. On surface it just appears to be a normal travel book with lots of biographical and historical anecdotes thrown in but what makes it different from the run of the mill travel books is that the writer is not interested in the landscapes just for the sake of it, he is interested in the desolate, lonely landscapes only in so far as they provoke some thoughts and feelings in the writer's head and with Sebald those thoughts and feelings are invariably deeply and movingly melancholic and yet the book is surprisingly extremely uplifting overall (which I use as an approving term). I came out of the book with a sense of amazement and wonder at having seen some mysterious connection between everything which was completely invisible to the eyes earlier. In this book Sebald achieves that rare, difficult aim of every artist--using one's raw experiences and making something beautiful and meaningful out of it by putting those experiences in a unified structure using the power of one's imagination and creativity.
The search for meaning and unity becomes even more important given the subject matter of the book. The writer is taking a walking tour of the seashore English counties of Suffolk and Norfolk and muses variously on different subjects ranging from the horrors of Belgian colonialism, an anatomical painting by Rembrandt, palace intrigues in the nineteenth century China, the exiled life of various literary figures like Joseph Conrad and many other people and things. All these and more seem too disparate and random to make any sense as a whole but in Sebald's hands these things become mysteriously connected to become one unified whole. The theme perhaps that binds all these things is the idea of the transience of all things human and even non-human or what Thomas Browne, one of the nineteenth century personages described in the book, calls the "opium of time" and "iniquities of oblivion".
In writing the book Sebald does what every writer dreams of doing: he manages to move through space and time seamlessly and relates his story in what might be called in philosophical terms, in Eternal Present. And by giving such contemporaneous weight to the people and events, which are marginalised by the cruel indifference of the relentless march of time, he also undoes to a large extent the iniquities of oblivion. Absolutely scintillating overall.
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