Customer Reviews

Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage (Panther S.)

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Sebald's book is full of destruction and loss, yet hope radiates from the objects that remain. The author is deeply curious and impressively educated, which allows him to see cycles of life and death in cities, buildings, artifacts, and engravings. A marvelous storyteller, he weaves fantastic yarns so full of digressions that the reader seems to be dreaming. "I'll just push to the end of the chapter," I would think, but when I reached it, the pattern of each story was so plain, the sense of distance so sharp that my head was clear, my mind refreshed. I'd be left with a few strands of meaning that would serve as the warp for the woof of the next chapter. I was never sure where Sebald was going on his ramble through Suffolk - it was almost like accompanying a somnambulist - but in the end I had entered his dream and luminous ghosts paraded before me, full of light and forgiveness. Leaving the spell of his book, I looked at the old, familiar world with new horror and wonder, a stranger on a new planet with my first inkling of the real story.

The 17th century philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne, spoke of an "Eternal Present," in which one could move through space and time and interconnect all things with...all things. In this brilliant book, the late W.G. Sebald has accomplished what Browne could only write about. He has obliterated time and distance and caused "memory" to live in the present, rather than the past, tense, and he has done so in a spectacularly successful manner.

Outwardly, Sebald takes us on a walking tour of East Anglia (County Suffolk), but in reality he is leading us on a journey through time and memory in which one thing inexorably leads to another and yet another and yet another. For example, a simple ride on a miniture railway train built for the Emperor of China leads Sebald to think about dragons, which leads him to think about the Taiping mass suicide of 1864. That, in turn, leads the author to thoughts of the cruel and evil dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, an empress who poisoned her nephew, Kuang Hsu, in a slow and terrible manner.

A not-so-lovely Rembrandt painting, "Anatomy Lesson," causes Sebald to think about 17th century Dutch customs; the mass executions in the Balkans lead to thoughts of Kurt Waldheim. There are many, many more fascinating juxtapositions and comparisons.

Sebald begins each chapter with a personal memoir, then begins to expand and connect, erasing the barriers of time and distance and causing us to question what is fact and what is fiction. After all, we would not put it past the inventive Sebald to create much of what he is relating himself. However, it really doesn't matter what is historically true and what is not. In this book, the question is not, "What?" but "Why?" Why did Edward FitzGerald translate nothing but "The Rubiyat?" How did Chateaubriand manage to keep living after falling so deeply and madly and passionately in love with Charlotte Ives? In this book, ghosts inhabit time and space side by side with the living; the world of memory becomes as real and tangible as the world just outside our door.

Interestingly, each chapter contains musings regarding silk. In the first chapter, we learn that Sir Thomas Browne's father was a silk merchant; in the last chapter Sebald's musings are of the habits of the silkworm and the culture of silk, itself. For Browne, Sebald tells us in Chapter One, silk was a metaphor of the "indestructability of the human soul." I found that Sebald's preoccupation with silk also provided a wonderful metaphor for this book, a book which is spun and enlarged much like a silkworm spins her web, entangling the reader with the writer. The central metaphor of "The Rings of Saturn," however, is one of burning, something that continually brings our memory back to the Holocaust.

If you've read "The Emigrants," you'll find this book more accessible and more expansive, but also more haunting and, in a sense, strangely odd. In "The Emigrants," time was compressed; in "The Rings of Saturn," time is expanded into annihilation. Sebald wrote this book after suffering a "nervous breakdown" and he weaves strands of his suffering into his reminiscences. And, although this is a haunting and melancholy book, it is by no means depressing. It's enigmatic, hallucinatory, transcendent, luminous. Sebald's prose is, as it always is: crystalline and perfect, though curiously detached and muted. Sebald writes of loss and of decay and devastation, yet he keeps himself, and us, at arm's length from it. Although he had lived and taught for many years in England, Sebald's prose shows us that he remained German to the core. Michael Hulse's translation is absolutely superb.

The rings surrounding the planet, Saturn, were apparently formed from the frozen particles of one of its moons. Just as these particles of a long, lost moon circle Saturn again and again and again, so do our memories, frozen in time and space, circle our lives until their very end. W.G. Sebald was a writer like no other. He was a true artist who, with his melancholy yet luminous prose, created a new way of seeing ourselves and the world around us. We are so lucky to have the work he left us.

Rings of Saturn was my introduction to Sebald, a marvelously evocative writer. His penetrating prose reveals so many layers of the English countryside. Sebald looks through the tarnished lens of history to a past most people would prefer not to see. In this case, a slowly decaying England whose imperial past has come back to haunt it. He tells each tale like an individual case study, loosely built around Thomas Browne's "Journal of Medical Biography."

Sebald makes many salient observations. I particularly liked his study of Roger Casement, his contact with Joseph Conrad, his various peregrinations and ultimate trial for sedition, as a result of his support of the Irish freedom movement. Within this chapter, Sebald condenses Casement's tortuous history to its essential elements. Sebald noted with irony that Casement's hidden homosexuality may have been what sensitized him to the continuing oppression and exploitation that cuts across social and racial boundaries of those who lie the furthest away from the centres of power.

This is a thought-provoking journey, reminiscent of other solitary travellers such as Rousseau and Proust, looking into the darker reaches of mankind. There is an essential humanity to all his stories. Each meticulously researched, distilled, and presented in this evocative collection of personal observations.

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.

Tomorrow is the first death anniversary of W G Sebald. On behalf of his adoring readers I wish to pay homage to this astonishing writer whose sublime novels are the noblest artefacts of the literary conscience of our times and a gift to humanity. Sebald has left us the true literary masterpieces of the 1990s and the inaugural texts of tomorrow's fiction. A postmodern-existentialist, Sebald channeld a deep drift of pensive introspection into pathbreaking narratives of elegiac wisdom and enchanting beauty that explain who we are in time,history and the cosmos. An account of a walking tour of Suffolk undertaken in 1992,The Rings of Saturn dizzly spirals beyond walking the ephemeral earth where "it takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes" into a celestial contemplation that soars to include everything and exclude nothing and reach a heaven of "a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and there will be no more grief or pain, or weeping and wailing." As he travels through the Suffolk countryside, Sebald unifies numberless people, places and events that are normally scattered in time and space into the ulitimate epiphany of the eternity of a moment and the infinity of a place that comes streaming into his consciousness in a narrative annunciation like " the rays of the sun...that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence." While "it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day," it is an imponderable enigma that our hopeless ephemerality allows us companionship in consciousness with countless centuries. Befitting a novel about the mystery of Oneness, Sebald's title is mystically grand and suggests that the writing of his novel is not different from the occurrence of the rings of Saturn. Can we walk in eternity? Can we walk to eternity. Sebald has.

Too much, I think, has been made of the hybrid nature of this lovely, chilling book. All true works of art defy categorization; this is a work of art; enough said. What strikes me as near miraculous when reading Mr. Sebald's book is the unbelievably fine prose it is built out of. Great credit in this regard must of course be given to Michael Hulse for his translation -- one has a sense akin to that experienced when reading Kerrigan's translation of Borges, that it was originally written in English. However, it is my suspicion that Sebald's deeply classical line would render itself with incontrovertible authority into almost any language. Reading this work I get the same feeling I get when I am looking at a Poussin or a Cezanne -- that I am involved with something so clearly and precisely built that (despite Sebald's injunction that all is combustion) it will defy any and all attempts at its destruction. I have read nothing recently that can compare.

W. G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" is categorized as a work of fiction, although it is often difficult to discern what is, in fact, imagined and what is real. Dreamlike, mysterious, sublime, enigmatic, strange--all these adjectives appropriately have been used to describe Sebald's remarkable work of literary, philosophical and historical imagination.

"The Rings of Saturn" is a first person narrative of the author's year-long ramble through East Anglia beginning in August, 1992. It is a "ramble" not only in the physical sense--a walker's tour and observation of the natural surroundings and history of the land--but also in the mental sense, being a series of historical, philosophical and psychological digressions triggered by everything Sebald sees and experiences on his journey. The landscapes are, thus, both interior and exterior. They are also landscapes that exist not only in the present, but extend back into the past and forward into the future; both natural and mental history become trans-temporal, the ground for a dreamlike ponderousness that, at times, takes the reader's breath away.

"The Rings of Saturn" is, in many ways, a dark relation of the author's experience, for he "became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over [him] at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place." He ends up, at the end of his journey--"a year to the day after [he] began his tour"--in a total state of immobility in a Norwich hospital. It is here that the book begins, that Sebald "began in [his] thoughts to write these pages."

Filled with grainy and sometimes mysterious, disturbing and imaginatively illustrative black and white photographs of the narrator's thoughts and experiences, "The Rings of Saturn" is equally fertile in flights of imaginative and historical reflection. Thus, the author's stay in the Norwich hospital leads to a digressive exploration of the obscure writings of the seventeenth century writer Thomas Browne, whose skull was at one time kept in the hospital's museum, an old-time cabinet of wonders. This, in turn, runs into a discursis on Rembrandt's painting, "The Anatomy Lesson". Reaching the seaside leads to an exploration of the history of herring fishing. The dim recollection of a PBS documentary on the life of Roger Casement, a recollection floating in the narrator's mind as he drifts off to sleep, leads to a detailed exploration of Joseph Conrad's experiences in the Belgian Congo, where Conrad had briefly encountered Casement.

The digressions go on and on. "The Rings of Saturn" is, in a sense, like being in the mind of Sebald during the course of time, a mind experiencing reality, dreaming illusion, and speculating on nature, man, literature, and time. The imaginary becomes real; the real, imaginary. Thus, tracts of Borges are cited as authority, treated as valid scientific works, when Sebald discusses time. "The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlon. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory."

Conflating the real and imaginary, the historical and the fictional, "The Rings of Saturn" represents an obsessive and powerful work of literature, a narrative that shows the uncanny ways in which imagination can be used to connect our lives with the world and with the past, even though "we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

Every so often a book comes along that is utterly transcendent. "The Rings of Saturn" is not so much a story as an experience. I am inside the mind of W.G. Sebald or someone he imagined. Starting at the medulla, his sensory walk along the English coastline, I follow his synapses through unexpected pathways and poignant meanderings as he meditates on triumphs and failures, large and small, during the Twentieth Century. Along the way of this neural journey, he flashes up pictorial images to enhance his stories of strange characters in strange places. I am seduced by his wry wit and palpable fascinations. The book becomes a reverie, like sitting by the fireplace with a warm dog, rapt, in my lap. This is the art of writing at its finest. This is the feeling of reading at its most restful. I do not want it to stop. I loop back into it, any place, any time, and like a memory, I drink from its fountain forever.

In his third work of prose fiction (the word 'novel' seems somehow too banal for what Sebald writes), the German-born writer long resident in England takes a solitary walking trip along the English coast from Norwich to Harwich. Upon this 'travel narrative' framework, Sebald embroiders a wide-ranging meditation on human cruelty and genocide and its possible connections to the amoral 'cruelty' of nature. As Sebald walks along this lonely, decaying stretch of North Sea coast, images suggestive of the Shoah and other 20th century atrocities seem to appear everywhere, until ultimately the book becomes a portrait of a mind haunted by the Holocaust--and by the possibility that cruelty seems to be everywhere because it really IS everywhere... This is a staggering achievement.

Sebald takes a walk in Suffolk. He sees places and things, and remembers people and books, and thinks of history. This triggers reflections on natural, social and cultural decay, on human greed and callousness, on inhuman monstrosities.
It goes like this: he is in Lowestoft, the easternmost city of England, in an area that is depressed and that had a somewhat more glorious past. Fisheries, shipping, shipbuilding have all declined dramatically, actually all but disappeared. Joseph Conrad had lived there for a while. Off we go into a part biography of Konrad Korzeniowski, up until he experiences the heart of darkness and walks out of his job in the Congo. We learn about colonialism's darkest sides, then the narration shifts, like a relay baton, to Roger Casement, who had been British Consul in the Congo and who blew the whistle on the practices, of course to no avail. But the man proceeded to do the same in his next post in the Amazon area and ended up siding with the white Indians of Ireland, which earned him a death sentence and a hanging for treason.
Sebald walked South and at the river Blyth he saw the narrow gauge railway track, of the train that had been made for an emperor of China, but had not been delivered, so it runs in Southwold now ('now' being early 1990s). So off we go: into the last decades of the doomed and inefficient and callous Qing dynasty, with the picture book Empress Dowager, back to the British infamy of the Opium Wars, the tremendous upheaval of the Taiping Rebellion, the massacres and famines.
There is more of course. There is the walking itself, the country and sea, the people met. And more stories, my two examples are just the ones that interested me most (a. Conrad, b.China).
The headline quote is from Thomas Browne, of the 17th century. Other authors that are woven into the narrative of the walk, either by their life or by their work, are Kafka, Flaubert, Diderot, Levi-Strauss, Borges, Stendhal, Swinburne, Hoelderlin, Grimmelshausen, Omar Quayam, Chateaubriand ...
This is maybe the most bookish 'travel book' that I have found. Maybe it is not for everyone, but for me it is just right.