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The Rings of Saturn

by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (Translator)

4.3 of 5 stars 4.30 · rating details · 2,883 ratings · 333 reviews

"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 stra...more

Paperback, 296 pages

Published April 17th 1999 by New Directions (first published 1995)

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Jul 12, 2012 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, history, ficciones, photography, travels, historiophantasmagoria

Can't wait:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pftG3s...

It was difficult to imagine the holidaymakers and commercial travelers who would want to stay there, nor was it easy…to recognize the Albion as the “hotel on the promenade of a superior description” recommended in my guidebook, which had been published shortly after the turn of the century.

Of course this connoisseur of desuetude, this dreamer on oblivion, tramps about with a lapsed guide book. The better to savor what’s disappeared from the land...more

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Feb 06, 2013 [P] rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bitchin

It was around 18 months ago that I read this novel. I was spending a week with my then girlfriend’s family at her parents' home in Cornwall. If you know me at all then you would most likely already be aware that ‘family’ is not my thing, and that, after previous unpleasant experiences with my girlfriends’ parents, I would have sacrificed my testicles to have avoided it. But, it seemed important to my girlfriend, it seemed, more pertinently, like an ordinary, natural, thing to do, and so, althoug...more It was around 18 months ago that I read this novel. I was spending a week with my then girlfriend’s family at her parents' home in Cornwall. If you know me at all then you would most likely already be aware that ‘family’ is not my thing, and that, after previous unpleasant experiences with my girlfriends’ parents, I would have sacrificed my testicles to have avoided it. But, it seemed important to my girlfriend, it seemed, more pertinently, like an ordinary, natural, thing to do, and so, although it felt unnatural to me, I considered myself obliged.

Things didn’t start well during the drive down. It takes something like five hours on the motorway to drive from the north of England to where her parents lived, and, inevitably, we started to irritate and antagonise each other as the journey progressed. The principle bone of contention was her wanting to listen to the radio and me, you know, not wanting to listen to the radio. I can’t bear the inane DJ chatter, the only relief from which is provided by the awful records they play. After this long and tiring drive I was introduced to her parents over a formal dinner, which is, for someone who once had an eating disorder, quite a chore. Of course, that I once had a problem with food is not her parents' fault; that the mother was quite possibly the coldest, most arrogant, most uptight, most status-obsessed, woman I have ever met [which is unfortunate for someone who is/was a psychiatrist] certainly was. Indeed, in an effort to dissuade her daughter from continuing to pursue a relationship with me she told her one day [I found this out after we had come home, but it was a conversation that took place between them during my stay] that she thought I was someone who had ‘major issues,’ who would one day have ‘a massive breakdown’ and, in conclusion, compared me, with absolutely no justification, to a friend who beat up his wife! Phew, is that all?

So, throughout the week there was an atmosphere of unease, of tension, of simmering resentment; I didn’t like her mother [although I persevered with being as polite as possible], her mad mother clearly didn’t like me [I wasn’t rich enough, is my guess], and my girlfriend, unfortunately, found herself in the middle, which led to she and I, who hadn’t got off to a great start anyway, occasionally snapping at each other. All of this stupidly, childishly, came to head one evening, during a get together with her friends, when she pestered me to put on a jumper in case I got cold. I, who was already on edge and who has always hated being told what to do, snapped back that she needed to stop mothering me. We split up not long after all this, and while one could not say with any certainty that it was the cause, I can’t help thinking that the ‘jumper incident' in particular had created a small, but unstoppable, impossible to repair, crack in our relationship.

In my mind, then, The Rings of Saturn is associated with sadness, frustration, and intensifying unease. I read the book in the car, to and from Cornwall, on the beach, in my girlfriend’s old childhood bed. As it turned out, and unbeknownst to me when I decided to take the novel with me, I really could not have a chosen a more apt book to read during that week. Of course, I don’t mean in an obvious way; The Rings of Saturn is not about a failing relationship, or an odious mother, but it is about despair and loneliness, destruction and decay [amongst other things]. Sebald is most often associated with big ideas, with events of historical importance, with the holocaust, but to my mind he is equally, perhaps more, adept at chronicling the seemingly insignificant, the small things. In Austerlitz, it was the beautiful scene with the moths that stuck in my mind, here it is the description of a copulating couple on a beach as resembling a multi-limbed sea creature washed up on shore. This ability to conjure beauty out of the minutiae of existence is a rare talent, and seemed all the more relevant to my experience as I wandered, in a melancholy daze, through unknown woods, and fields where wild horses were said to live, and along windy, near-deserted, beaches with someone I felt I was soon to lose.

I chose to take the novel with me primarily because it is ‘about’ a journey along the south coast of England which is close to where my girlfriend’s parents lived. As is always the case with Sebald the novel is written as though it were some kind of travel writing or memoir. An unnamed narrator, who we assume is WG himself, wakes up in a hospital bed having suffered a serious mental breakdown upon the completion of his previous work [which, I believe, we are meant to think is The Emigrants]. Once well enough to 'takes off' along the coast, documenting his often mundane, but strangely magical, experiences. I am sure many reviewers, unlike myself, would like to pontificate about the themes and style, but, I'm afraid, like Proust's madeleine this book has a transportative effect upon me, which, for a writer so concerned with memory and time and history, and the relationship between the particular and the general, would probably have pleased the now sadly deceased German very much.(less)

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Mar 17, 2009 John rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: readers who like meditation & significant stimulation

Recommended to John by: Alexander Hemon

Shelves: avatars-gods-energy-sources, fine-strange-foreign

The epigraph informs us that the "rings" of the 6th planet are in fact nothing but rubble. Worse, I can't think of any recent work of imagination -- Sebald published during the 1990s -- that so exposes the wreckage that inevitably results from our strutting & fretting hour on the stage. RINGS is all about wreckage, w/ one quiet, unsettling meditation on destroyed worlds after another, linked by nothing more than a vacation walkabout one August in the Sussex countryside. It's an odyssey w/out...more The epigraph informs us that the "rings" of the 6th planet are in fact nothing but rubble. Worse, I can't think of any recent work of imagination -- Sebald published during the 1990s -- that so exposes the wreckage that inevitably results from our strutting & fretting hour on the stage. RINGS is all about wreckage, w/ one quiet, unsettling meditation on destroyed worlds after another, linked by nothing more than a vacation walkabout one August in the Sussex countryside. It's an odyssey w/out an Ithaca, & our lonesome guide is no warrior. He's deep into middle age & no drama hangs over his meandering. Yet his reflections prove compelling, & not just because of its brilliance at the level of sentence & scene; while never a novel in an ordinary sense, the experience as a whole proves richly satisfying & paradoxically affirming. RINGS stands as the peak of Sebald's inspired sequence of anti-narratives (a sustained late-in-life aria that ended w/ a car crash on the cusp of the new millennium) out-doing even his earlier theme-&-variations on the Holocaust, THE EMIGRANTS. On the one hand it's forever probing into timeless questions, taking us back to eternal values, even celebrating what used to be called "masterpieces of Western literature," like Dante & Conrad & KING LEAR. The glide of a water-bug across the surface-tension of a rain-barrel will shiver us w/ its reminder of our own tightly-circumscribed voyage, our own fragile suspension in this element. On the other hand, the book's a crystalline & spectacular model of that thing so many folks still find off-putting & hard to know, namely, postmodern art. Blithely these RINGS loop through episodes of efflorescence & decay, from once-exotic resort towns to the boom & bust of the herring industry -- & much more, much -- & yet Sebald's framework locates this serendipity cheek by jowl, the wildly diverse forever physically close. Such a wittily disruptive construction strips away the usual reassurances of story while delivering, nonetheless, the ancient & essential narrative pleasure of surprise & wonderment. The genius of Sebald is to expose all our vanity & failure, w/ a level voice & a cold eye, while at the same time restoring us, dizzied & bareheaded in open country, to awe.(less)

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Nov 20, 2010 ·Karen· rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: in-german

My second outing with Sebald turns out to be a fairly similar experience to the first. His writing is hallucinatory, meditative, ruminative, pondering; it is hard to read without your own mind wandering off into fields of its own, and then returning to the page to find that you're in a new place, new time, and not quite sure how you got there. It feels like those days of fever when you listen to the radio and drift off in between times, re-awakening to find that the documentary you were listenin...more

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Mar 06, 2011 Abailart rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-autobiography, fiction, history, culture, philosophy, psychology, slowly-reading, travel, spirit

Indeed, in historiography, the indisputable advantage of a fictitious past have become apparent: secondary or tertiary worlds as imagined in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius manifest themselves from the ideas and representations of the world onto the physical world itself. In the final analysis, says a voice in The Rings of Saturn, our entire work is based upon nothing but ideas. Yet these ideas – or representations – are flimsy as film, and they change over the years and which time and time again cau...more Indeed, in historiography, the indisputable advantage of a fictitious past have become apparent: secondary or tertiary worlds as imagined in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius manifest themselves from the ideas and representations of the world onto the physical world itself. In the final analysis, says a voice in The Rings of Saturn, our entire work is based upon nothing but ideas. Yet these ideas – or representations – are flimsy as film, and they change over the years and which time and time again cause one to tear down what one had thought was finished, and begin again from scratch: this from farmer Thomas Abrams who has devoted 20 years to building a model of the Temple of Jerusalem, a model that can never in reality be completed since it needs constant revision as archaelogists and scholars make new discoveries, imagine from ruins a complete whole, one may say an idealised whole outside time. Borgesian throughout, in The Rings of Saturn we never know quite where we are: only the imagined past seems a permanent orienting position.

Fiction is the more real. Sebald’s narrator is a fictional one in that it can be given the distanced and flat perspective on things. It can blend seamlessly into other first person narrative voices; it can with equal ease take an omniscient view. The long paragraphs (bearing little relation to paragraphs as we usually encounter them) compress disparate elements of story, theme, imagery and linkages with the rest of the book. Long lists of catalogued exotica (here I am reminded very sharply of Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, and not just here) combine with this compression to require a slow reading, a savouring of the sensuous surfaces of life, and function with other devices to mourn, if ironically, the attempts to overcome time and death (Umberto Eco has written that we love lists because we fear death, and our possessions perhaps, ideational or material, are like those ordering lists that can be classified and set into quasi-permanence) yet in reality, as far as we can know some stable underlying reality, Just as people supposed they could uphold some straight line, some dramatic and unexpected deterioration would compel them….to the last post, prisoners in their own homes. Ostensibly writing about the decay of country manors, Sebald is constantly thinning the line between psyche and physical – land, weather, buildings.

It would take an infinite line of academics to complete a commentary on the book (each commentary of course producing yet more commentaries). Duplication is the curse of humanity in ideas, copulation and mirrors, mirrors and paintings being covered in Victorian times at homes of the dead so that departed souls could move on unimpeded by reflection of themselves or representations of the world: memory too is a curse; memories can blind us to life. As for writing about our memories, as a memoir, as the Vicomte de Chateaubriand confesses, this removal from life through memories and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! I dare say that the same is true for writing reviews.

Yet, as the Vicomte goes on, And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, an there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! – so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. Yet life itself, the ‘reality’ of it, is a chain of unexpected calamities, time and time again. One is like Kafka’s insect caught between impossible existential threats. Out in the flat landscapes of Suffolk, beneath the huge skies, without a soul in sight, Sebald as author-narrator recalls, At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past…. Destruction and decay are everywhere, the very will of the past. After exploring an old military research station, he is engulfed by a sandstorm where all shape and form is lost, sky and land are lost, and he imagines the world as it will be when it has finally worn itself out. Definition so beautifully evoked in exotic stories, almost fairytales, of far away times and opulent places, definition as the rage to order the world in encyclopaedic taxonomies, classifications and catalogues all go under in the dark and indifferent chaos that engulfs all feeble order. Elite ruling families, palaces, the land itself, entire dynasties go down. All that remains is one disaster after an other.

There is a psychic space where one loses even the ability to name feelings, perhaps the most dreadful space of all. Or it may be that feelings are socially and literarily structured as convenient communal bulwarks against affective disorder, and that to be open – on the flat land, under the big sky – to what is really there, inside, outside if these have valid distinctive meanings, is to experience something deeper and stranger than conventional emotions. At any rate, I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure than a pain. Walking, of course, is a convenient metaphor for many things, as the new psychogeographers have theorised. Yet it’s more than praise to the writer for having so successfully evoked the inseparable melancholy tone from its physical counterpart to suggest that the bodily basis of thinking – or writing – is so well represented in the labyrinthine footpaths, dead ends and, one startling image, a signpost with nothing written on it. The solitary way is bleak and relieved only from the image of its own fragility and decay by re-presented, imagined worlds – and all worlds are imagined anyway. The rings of Saturn are there and not there, tied to forces which they require for their orbit, insubstantial as ice particles, but there perhaps as much as imagined worlds are, similarly held in place by forces of nature including history, yet containing an autonomy.

Frequently Sebald evokes a peopleless world: empty streets seen from a hospital window, the marshes, an aeroplane high in the sky although carrying hundreds of people seeming but as an object. When he lets a thought take him in what he calls his ‘notes’, ‘these notes’, he will bring to life a complete fiction based on fact, possibly a fiction that is located within a dream of the imagined author, fictionalised conversations and situations of real historical figures. Mostly these figures are wealthy, live in opulence, are part of the ruling elite, played crucial but often hidden roles in the course of history. The solidity of their wealth and power as evoked imaginatively is in a fictional permanence which is located in only the place that memory can create permanence, a permanence doubtless imagined not only by an observer looking back but also by the imaginary worlds of those who lived, and who still live. The latter as the former will in a different discourse succumb to erosion, decay, collapse, burial. But history qua history can be willed as a process of selection. One ‘thread’ followed by Sebald from the Chinese Empress’s cultivation of silk worms to the bizarre Third Reich educational programme for producing silk takes in the Norwich workers who, years before the Industrial Revolution, were strapped to wooden machines resembling instruments of torture, driven to bad dreams by their work yet who were, at this point of the history of silk making items of a truly fabulous variety, and of an irridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds. There is so much the reader needs to do to question and explore the many spaces Sebald opens up.

Since quotidian details of the author-narrator’s encounters with people on his walk are few and far between, one is invited by this lacuna to flesh out the real people of the world, to question whether we do this by evoking a simulated thickness of reality through imagination, that is by seeing others through structures similar to literary modes of representation, or whether we are in our world in a more direct apprehension of it. We may know that we are going to share the same dismal destiny as our forbears, yet in the physical encounter with the world, with Nature, with people, with our visceral defiance of war and cruelty perhaps there is enough to live by. The mind is subordinate to the body and the ground it walks upon, secondary to ideas which it knows it is the source of. It may be odd these days to welcome pain and pleasure equally, but in the end the pain of memory and its freedoms, and the constraints of the human condition that allow its freedoms are, whether we like it or not, how it is. For the wretched Vicomte too, life was worth it even though he once despaired, The chronicler…. inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body. In the writing, he …. is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent.

(less)

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Feb 22, 2011 Jimmy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: germany, male, walking, poetic-essay, year-1990s, truly-madly-deeply-original

Update February 22, 2011:

I just re-read this book a few days ago and reading back on my initial impression of Sebald is both humbling and embarrassing. I kind of missed the point, didn't I?

I still see what I was saying back then, and think you have to either be in a certain mood or be willing to be enchanted into that mood in order to fall in love with this work. Nevertheless, I am glad I didn't give up on him and moved on to read his entire works. This book, on second read, is the least memoir-...more Update February 22, 2011:

I just re-read this book a few days ago and reading back on my initial impression of Sebald is both humbling and embarrassing. I kind of missed the point, didn't I?

I still see what I was saying back then, and think you have to either be in a certain mood or be willing to be enchanted into that mood in order to fall in love with this work. Nevertheless, I am glad I didn't give up on him and moved on to read his entire works. This book, on second read, is the least memoir-like of his books, I think. Even though that element is still in there, it is weaved in with so many other elements from his research and ideas.

And perhaps that makes it even more fragmented and hard to follow than his other books... though I've learned that part of the joy of reading Sebald is to lose yourself, to let go, to feel slightly out of control of what you are reading, but to be enjoying it anyway, to be on the receiving end of a magical act... or to be the object in which magic has already taken place. To be the rabbit who is just now emerging from the hat.

Original review (3 stars) from August 1, 2008:

It's one of those books that sound better on paper as an idea than when you're actually reading it. I feel like it gets more credit than it deserves simply because people consider it "innovative", but taken passage by passage, there is nothing very innovative about it. It's simply a blend of memoir and historical essay. If it were categorized as either, nobody would raise an eyebrow, but the simple fact that it has the "Novel" label attached to it has everybody in a frenzy.

But I don't judge a book by how innovative it is, so even if it's not innovative, that's not the main problem. The main problem is that it never rises above a level of good or merely interesting, never feels completely spontaneous, never totally alive (though it tries so hard to be free form... "like jazz"). Everything feels so well "considered" (not that it shouldn't actually be, but it shouldn't feel labored when read) that at times I would say it's even lifeless. Thankfully, Sebald is good at avoiding the jargon of an academic, but at heart he IS an academic. Only in novelist's clothing and with a taste for occasionally delving into the personal.

Above all, the book never changes course, it is steady as can be. It's like listening to an album all the way through and then realizing that all the songs (though different in melody) have the same level of intensity, the same register of emotion, never building up to anything or calming down from something, just one flat line of consistently being merely "good".

The one exception is the very beginning. The first chapter of the book is the most interesting and cohesive and I was actually beginning to expect great things from the book. Despite my complaints, I did enjoy the book, and am interested in reading more of Sebald to see if his other novels have anything different to offer.

At times, the book achieves what I call "so boring it's bold", which is a characteristic I really like in some of my favorite films... like in those Kiarostami films where he intentionally repeats some visual motif to the point where it's at the risk of losing the viewer's interest. But at the same time, there is something intriguing about it and you keep watching, and it has something to do with the pacing or something else interesting in the frame that is not the main object of concern but that forces it out of merely "boring-boring" into the "so boring it's bold" category. The very nature of the category (in my mind) is that it rides that fine line between "boring" and "interesting" so dangerously.

I think the boring-ness makes your mind wander which is exactly the point: so that you're paying less attention to the "main thing" and more on the visceral level of the word (or image if you're talking about film). I've rarely encountered this effect in literature, except in VS Naipaul's novels, though I can't even get through one of his novels because they eventually become just "boring-boring" to me. But there is a point early on in Naipaul's novels that I admire the same quality, where I feel viscerally connected to something lying right beyond an obstinate rhythm.(less)

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Feb 09, 2012 tim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ambling along England’s eastern Suffolk coast, Sebald wanders from inward reverie through outward reverie exploring any and all directions connected to the landscape traversed. I can honestly say I have never encountered a book quite like this. Part travelogue, part historical meditation, part (non?-) fictional memoir. The carefully researched historical vignettes interweave with eloquent reflections of a personal nature. Dreams, war, history and disappointment all bleed into each other, paintin...more

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Aug 13, 2011 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: german

a feeling of repetition ... a peculiar numbness like a grammophone repeatedly playing the same sequence of notes ... Repeatedly I felt as if I were lying in a traumatic fever in some kind of field hospital ...

Sebald's words, not mine. But apt.

Perhaps it's Summer. The tomatoes are ripening but stinkbugs and a chipmunk are fighting me for the harvest. The local nine have teased me after 18 losing seasons but they can not beat the Brewers ever and sometimes not even the Cubs. A new iphone beckons w...more

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Sep 15, 2008 Stephen Gallup rated it 4 of 5 stars

I first heard of WG Sebald from an author/professor (Robin Hemley) who spoke during a workshop at the University of Iowa. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn came up in the context of books that straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction. He observed that, generally speaking, “as the popularity of memoir has increased, the value placed on imagination has decreased.” Intrigued, I found a copy of this book back home in San Diego and was halfway through it when I discovered that another author/professor...more I first heard of WG Sebald from an author/professor (Robin Hemley) who spoke during a workshop at the University of Iowa. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn came up in the context of books that straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction. He observed that, generally speaking, “as the popularity of memoir has increased, the value placed on imagination has decreased.” Intrigued, I found a copy of this book back home in San Diego and was halfway through it when I discovered that another author/professor I know was also reading it and reacting in the same way I was: We both kept wanting to stop and read passages aloud to our partners.

Everyone seems stumped in classifying Sebald’s work. In a sense, this might be called travel writing in that the narrator is on a walking tour. However, the various scenes of decay and neglect that figure in his narrative are just jumping off points for meditations on various historical figures and events, so that it becomes more a memoir of his internal musings, rendered in language that is almost more like poetry than prose. The connections from one topic to the next are no more obvious than the various impressions moving through any active mind not engaged in a specific task. Indeed, the effect is dreamlike. The geography of where the walk takes place is far less important than his mental ramblings. In the case of Sebald’s writing at least, the trend away from imagination is not an issue.

I'd like to conclude with my favorite passage, which I could almost type in from memory. The only problem is that it's difficult to pick a beginning and ending point. The whole thing just flows continuously in this vein:

My way from Dunwich took me at first by the ruins of the Grey Friars' monastery, through a number of fields, and then to an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches and rampant gorse grew so densely that the going was very hard. I was beginning to think of turning back when all of a sudden the heath opened out in front of me. Shading from pale lilac to deepest purple, it stretched away westward, with a white track curving gently through its midst. Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly, and numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not so say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before, or, as it now seemed to me, in some distant past. Only in retrospect did I realize that the only discernible landmark on this treeless heath, a most peculiar villa with a glass-domed observation tower which reminded me somehow of Ostend, had presented itself time and again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other, so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image. Moreover, my sense of confusion was deepened by the fact that the signposts at the forks and crossings of the tracks gave no directions to any place or its distance; there was invariably, to my mounting irritation, no more than a mute arrow facing pointlessly this way or that. If one obeyed one's instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach. Simply walking straight ahead cross-country was out of the question on account of the heather, which was woody and knee-deep...(less)

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Jun 11, 2012 Tanuj Solanki rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: german, borrowed, memoir, la-times

Sebald

Everything wanted him to stand.
Everything was the lethargy he never thought of but knew,
And maybe it made him bolder, enigmatic,
And of a free forehead, a difficult state made possible;
He was a multitude standing erect over an amorphous thing,
As if to exit a time: a stable monument, machine-made.
Nothing below him stirred. He lunged. The fallow fields were smooth like silk,
And faraway, and soft, and silent.
He didn’t feel and there was too much clarity, a whole age had dulled, grey like a st...more

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Mar 19, 2011 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Sebald, who is and isn't the narrator of the memory trek called The Rings of Saturn, early on describes the contemplative methodology of the seventeenth century (meta)physician Sir Thomas Browne: he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator. This detached and potentially demiurgical approach serves Sebald admirably as he recalls a previous perambulation t...more Sebald, who is and isn't the narrator of the memory trek called The Rings of Saturn, early on describes the contemplative methodology of the seventeenth century (meta)physician Sir Thomas Browne: he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator. This detached and potentially demiurgical approach serves Sebald admirably as he recalls a previous perambulation through the solitary expanses of the Suffolk countryside in an effort to allay the paralysis that descended upon and debilitated him shortly after he concluded the journey he is setting to paper. The uneasy marriage of a boundless sense of freedom with a numbing horror at the human - and imperial - ruin that he unearthed with each day's ambulatory trek combined to put him in a Norwich hospital. Laid low by the pungent display of history's recollection, stirring the embers of that memory appears to be the only avenue of escape from his disordered condition.

The Rings of Saturn is a slow-burn blues, a measured, steady voyage across the shimmering steppe of fiction and non-fiction. The unsettling links between events that happened across millennia of global history wait to be discovered in every hamlet and village that lie sprinkled across the depopulated, wind-kissed plains of one small English county that borders the North Sea. Like a time-crafted matryoshka doll a palatial manor house , the skeletal remains of a medieval church, tent-bound fisherman lined up and down a Suffolk beach, a sailing ship espied on the horizon conjure up the billions of gallons that fueled the aerial destruction of Germany, the sea-battered ghost town of Dunwich, the profitable business of fishing the endless herring armies that roamed the North Sea, and a fierce sea battle between the English and the Dutch. These stirred tendrils of reminiscence don't extend their reach only to Northwestern Europe - further ventures into the quotidian landscape of Suffolk will cast the mind's eye in the direction of Central Africa and Imperial China.

What a strange, surreal, beguiling book. Sebald's tone is patient, thoughtful, deliberate without exception - the most brutal violence, the grossest injustice is set forth without emotion, the details only occasionally interrupted by acknowledgements of the rending despair, the crushing weight of insignificant loneliness that this graveyard-robbing voyage is creating. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the nature of the memories that time has stored in plots throughout an English backwater: there is only folly, eccentricity, obsession, violence, avarice and, ultimately, failure and dissolution. The myriad joys that flavor, and make bearable, the daily travails of human existence have no place of importance in the ashes kicked up by the narrator's daily intrusions; there is only the austere and sterile aftermath of hubristic mankind's efforts to harness and shape the bounty of a nature he mistakenly believes he is directing or controlling. This is what history so often coughs up for our edification: the deleterious and scouring expectorations of time, the parlance of conquest and triumph in the tones of frightened children; what was thriving now desiccated, what was populous now abandoned and forlorn. Better to remain aloof from the insular nervous system of remembrance, awash in the unknown and out of range of the past day's echoes - entering too freely into recollection without remoteness is the drawing of veils upon little that is diamond and much that is rust.

My favorite scene in The Rings of Saturn is where the narrator bemusingly wanders the flat, silted void that is Orfordness, a deserted island, squeezed between the sea and the tide-shaped river Ore, that was off limits during the tension-filled decades of the Cold War. Now open to the curious, it exists like a landscape transplanted from another planet - barren, muddy, uninviting, formless but for a handful of peculiar military constructions in the shape of temples and pagodas. What lunacy conjured such creations in this smeared stretch of hell? All that is missing from the desolation are the pedestal boastings of Ozymandias: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!(less)

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Oct 07, 2007 David S. rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: abstract thinkers, historians, philosophers

Here's what to expect: this book is one big tangent that begins with a walk on the coast of England. It riffs a lot on history and the transient nature of just about everything. There's war, imperialism, silk moths, herring, military, industrialism, and it goes on and off from there.

The book is written in a 'style' that I can only call jazz writing, in that it riffs and jams, and while jazz doesn't necessarily have a coherent thread if looked at from the book picture, in the flow of the music,...more

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Sep 28, 2008 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Like the rings of Saturn, Sebald's brilliant and melancholic book of the same name is also made up of fragments, which raise in the reader's mind images that are beautiful, ethereal, thought-provoking, and ultimately, devastatingly sad. Bound together by threads of silk, the anecdotes of an imaginal journey through space and time circle back upon themselves like the rings of Saturn or like the paths through the heather in which the narrator at one time becomes so overwhelmingly lost. In a work s...more

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Nov 06, 2012 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars

The first W.G. Sebald book I heard of was The Rings of Saturn (tr. by Michael Hulse). Something in the tone of the recommendation and the title of the book made me start to imagine how the book would feel and how I would feel about it — you’ve been there too. I tried to avoid such imaginings, but with all of its positive criticism it was hard to hold back my expectations.

When I began reading The Rings of Saturn I knew next to nothing about the book. Sure, I knew that it was structured as as wal...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Stewart Home rated it 1 of 5 stars

"By the time the desert arrived, Alan was talking about The Rings Of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. My companion considered this to be one of the worst travel books he had ever read. Sebald was a Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. This overpaid hack had taken the train from his academic base in Norfolk to the Suffolk border and then written an account of his travels south along the coast. Among other things, Sebald claimed to have difficulty imagining tha...more

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Jul 19, 2011 daniel greeson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Along the lines of W.G. Sebald’s other works, i.e. Austeritz, On the Natural History of Destruction, etc. comes The Rings of Saturn , a melancholic and philosophical meditation covering an extended fictional jaunt through Sebald’s adopted home of East Anglia. Personal history and the memory-saturated space of his journey poetically meld the angst, nostalgia, and incompleteness of the now deserted and once glorious and prosperous East Anglian coast. Sebald’s work is one of eccentric architects, t...more

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Apr 22, 2008 Andrea rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone with a healthy dose of curiosity

Recommended to Andrea by: David

Shelves: read-2008, fiction-general, translated-fiction

Despite the fact that it took me ages to read this (more a factor of my current reading habits than a commentary on the book), this was a really good read, interesting and arresting; I'm already thinking about when I can re-read it. Ostensibly an after-the-fact recounting of the long-distance walking tour Sebald undertook of Suffolk county, England, he mostly uses the locations and features of the countryside he passes through as launching pads for incredibly wide-ranging and disparate historica...more

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Nov 10, 2007 Liza rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: (s)elected affinities

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 everywher...more

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Nov 03, 2012 Jim Coughenour rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: european-fiction, experimental, translation, re-read

Is there any book more melancholy, more gently intelligent, than Sebald's Rings of Saturn? After watching Grant Gee's very fine documentary Patience (After Sebald), I was ready to read Sebald's book again. I first read it in 1998; on reading it again I found I remembered almost nothing except the mood of it – but maybe that's not surprising, as the book is, in a sense, nothing but mood, recounting Sebald's walking trip through Suffolk on the crumbling east coast of England, which turns out to be...more

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Apr 10, 2008 Andrew added it

Shelves: german-language-fiction, w-g-sebald

Moody as fuck. If you can deal without any kind of plot structure, than "The Rings of Saturn" is for you. And I'm definitely in this camp. There's a line in Calvino's "Invisible Cities" where Kubla Khan talks about how when Marco Polo describes cities, he talks about the thoughts of a man seated on a porch enjoying the breeze. And that's pretty much what Sebald is all about. The narrator is a highly enjoyable telescope, like Calvino's Mr. Palomar, discussing the history of the landscape, framing...more

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Aug 21, 2007 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars

A quiet walk among depressed English coastal towns is set against a montage of European history. Details from Sebald's journey through a near-forgotten hotel lead into reminisces of historical atrocities. A chance encounter with a book in an old museum crosses over into outrage at the destructions German cities during WW2. Staying in a town the Joseph Conrad lived in brings forth a long meditation on Conrad's like, Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and Roger Casement who brought colonial crimes t...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Jeff rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel, natural-history, documentary-narrative

A quick note on the absurdity in Sebald's text. Sebald makes a connection, in Chapter VI, between the River Blyth train, discovered on one of his walking tours of Northeast England, with its heraldic dragon seal, and the political calculus of the Empress Dowager, who, Sebald speculates, commissioned the train for Kuang-hsu, to bribe the boy-Emperor off at a time when the courtiers around him were, likely as not, poisoning him slowly under the Empress' orders. She at the same time could trust no...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Christy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2012, re-read

Haunting is a term that keeps appearing in popular and critical discourse of late. This makes sense to me. We live in a time when things disappear or become irrelevant very quickly, because of the feedback loop that’s been established between technological change and an economic system that expands as a result of it. The real consequence of this is not just the emergence of the new, or what might better be called the pseudo-new, but the disappearance of a large number of things and ideas that we...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Ajay R rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Oxford dictionary describes the term 'melancholy' as 'deep and long-lasting sadness'. This is the theme of W.G Sebald's 'The Rings of Saturn' which is about the inexorable passage of time, human greed, the changes and destruction both cause and the burden of memories. It's futile to classify this book as it is part memoir, part history, part myths and not the least about travels. Travel here doesn't refer to the normal travelogue which is about the beauty of a place, it's general history, pe...more

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Sep 02, 2012 Jeremy Allan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-fiction

After just commenting elsewhere on Goodreads about genre, I come to this book, which I finished a month ago, but have been pondering ever since, putting off my review. This is not historical fiction, though history courses through it like a system of rivers, and it is also not history. This book is fiction, pure though not in the sense that it lacks any factual statement, rather it is pure fiction in how it is the complete fabrication of a new world, perhaps even more fictitious on account of it...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Sebald takes a walk along England's flat, often bleak east coast, near where he used to teach, and ruminates in his inimitably looping, encyclopedic way on, well, everything. Sir Thomas Browne, death in general, shipwrecks, the Opium War, Belgian motorways....

Fans rave about this one, but I almost gave it a mere paltry three stars. Hypnotic, brilliant in parts, and full of melancholy delights, it just isn't as good as the great, great AUSTERLITZ. Why? Oddly, I think in part it's because he too...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Sara rated it 4 of 5 stars

“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk. . . . I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.”

And that’s pretty much the entire “plot” of this meditative account of a walking journey around a small slice of England. I...more

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May 09, 2012 Steve Porter rated it 4 of 5 stars

To those not familiar with W.G. Sebald, the title might sound like a work of sci-fi or fantasy. Far from it. This work is based around a journey the author made through Norfolk, although he goes off down so many sideroutes of personal interest that it's not even a travel book in any traditional sense. The topics covered include aspects of anatomy, history, herring fishing, Joseph Conrad, China, and the English hurricane of 1987, to name a few. And only Sebald would dare to end a book, classified...more

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Nov 25, 2011 Dave Comerford rated it 5 of 5 stars

The reason I signed up to Goodreads is to put a billboard up on the Information Super Highway extolling the virtues of this book. Sebald takes a walk along the Norfolk coastline, narrating his thoughts to us along the way. His professed goal is to relieve himself of the exhaustion he feels following the completion of a project in his day job, professor of German literature at the University of East Anglia. There is a searchingness about his writing that suggests a much deeper goal. His walk turn...more

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Nov 05, 2011 Brian Gatz rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't know if this is my favorite Sebald or if it is. I just wanted to comment on the general character of what I've read of his. There's a special quiet here that gives a great deal of energy--that allows thoughts to come about, that gives me no little comfort. Though life is difficult or disappointing, though frustrated by circumstance or State, there's a place where depth and patience wins out--though it only win a little. Sebald's documentation of history and its concerns, of who we become...more

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About W.G. Sebald

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory and loss of memory (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German peopl...more

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“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!--so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful.” — 18 people liked it

“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.” — 6 people liked it

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