Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Nov 03, 2011

Eric rated it:

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 landscape. I know now to apply “Sebaldia More...

13 comments like (20 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

John rated it:

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 odys More...

7 comments like (13 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Abailart rated it:

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...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Jimmy rated it:

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 More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Feb 09, 2012

tim rated it:

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...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Tony rated it:

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. More...

11 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2012

Karen rated it:

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...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Stephen rated it:

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...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Chris rated it:

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...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

David rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Michael rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

Stewart rated it:

"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 imaginin More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

daniel rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Andrea rated it:

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 historic More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Liza rated it:

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 green More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Andrew added it

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 More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Dan rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 25, 2011

Dave rated it:

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...

0 comments like

Nov 05, 2011

Brian rated it:

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...

0 comments like

Nov 11, 2011

Jeff rated it:

Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is a fascinating ramble through the dregs of colonial empire (among other things), presented in the form of a wandering travelogue. [return][return]There is a wonderfully random and recursive nature to many of Sebald's musings on history and literature, but there is a definite method to all of this - the author presents us with a variety of images and incidents that return to the arrogance, impotence, and violence inherent in European (and particularly British) colon More...

0 comments like

Nov 12, 2011

Peter rated it:

Reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn brought to mind the same scope and enjoyment of reading Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Both books begin with a lone figure strolling across an English landscape from which they are magnificently launched into an odyssey that examines universal frailties. Whereas Stapledon's protagonist jumps across imagined cosmic planes, Sebald jumps across terrestrial historical occurrences - the book is a wonderful collage of travel, memoir, biography and historical wri More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Anne rated it:

This is the first of his books that I came to (and I think the first to be published in English), and it hooked me: I'd never read anything like it. Swirls and meanders between history and fiction so that the concept of blurring lines just evaporates as you experience it. Sebald is definitely an intellectual, but one who manages to translate his meditations into something amazingly felt.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Terence rated it:

Have to add my thoughts on this Sebald, this was my first novel of his I read. For myself the most prominent element is the use of photography in the narrative. It helps in confusing the veracity and adjusting the pace. The observations and esoteric stories just add to this sense of something passed over. Amazing.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Jaga rated it:

a man - 6 stars
humankind - 0

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2011

Ben rated it:

Best book I've read so far this year.

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 15, 2012

Drew rated it:

From the beginning of Chapter V:

"On the second evening of my stay in Southwold, after the late news, the BBC broadcast a documentary about Roger Casement, who was executed in a London prison in 1916 for high treason. The images in this film, many of which were taken from rare archive footage, immediately captivated me; but nonetheless, I fell asleep in the green velvet armchair I had pulled up to the television. As my waking consciousness ebbed away, I could still hear every wor More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Christopher rated it:

W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is many different things. It is an autobiography of Sebald's own holiday throughout East England's countryside. But it is also a collection of short stories, with each chapter taking place in a different location on Sebald's voyage, and is devoted to the different characters and events he happens to run into while there. But it is also a book about the history of England, since every chapter goes into in depth discussions about the local folklore of the area in More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Laura rated it:

2½ tähteä, jos olisi mahdollista.

Saksalaisen natsiupseerin pojan Winfried Georg Sebaldin neljäs teos Saturnuksen renkaat on melankolinen kertomus Sebald-nimisestä miehestä (joka ehkä on hän itse tai ehkä ei), joka lähtee vaeltamaan pitkin
Itä-Englannin rannikkoa "päästäkseen eroon tyhjyydestä, joka valtaa hänen sisintään". Vuosi matkan aloittamisen jälkeen mies päätyy sairaalaan, jossa hän alkaa kirjoittaa reppureissunsa muistoja ylös. Syytä sairaalaan päätymiseen ei ker More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Joan rated it:

This book has been on my 'to read' list for a while - not the one here on goodreads, but the one that is in the back of my datebook, which is the only thing handy when I'm reading the paper, or get a suggestion from a friend. I'm not sure why this book was on the list or who suggested I read it - but I'm glad I did.

The overarching theme of the book is a walk that the narrator took in August 1992 is eastern England. Each chapter starts with something local before evoking a memory or More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Mike rated it:

An impressive interweaving of history curated by a writer of distinct interests, coupled with his descriptions and reflections as he traverses the countryside of eastern England. Often sobering and dispiriting as Sebald catalogues centuries of cruelty, warfare, and decay, failed schemes and deferred dreams.

Sebald often surprised me in the way he'd seemingly digress into one tangent only to reconnect with a previous theme. From the start the tone and discursiveness reminded me of Borg More...

0 comments like

reviews