The Rings of Saturn Author: W. G. Sebald Michael Hulse | Language: English | ISBN:
B00BGLCFCS | Format: PDF
The Rings of Saturn Description
Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit."—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review
"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."
- File Size: 3307 KB
- Print Length: 308 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0811214133
- Publisher: New Directions (March 15, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00BGLCFCS
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #58,391 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #41
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > German
- #41
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction > German
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?
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