The Rings of Saturn

Rating:
Summary: Absolute melancholy
Review: If life was a four dimensional still life, it would be like the wonderful amalgamation of landscapes and memories that Sebald presents in this book. You have to admire his fascination with the infinitely small and seemingly irrelevant details of our current and past world. The creeping melancholy is partly due to the inconsequential nature of most of those episodes of the past that are so minutely described. But in the end, you feel he has beautifully revealed a random selection of the million indispensable pieces that together compose the mosaic of life around us. And the best part is that the next time you go for a walk your eyes will be wide open.

Rating:
Summary: Ssstrange...
Review: If you've read Sebald before, Rings of Saturn won't disappoint. You're literally swept off your feet and carried in an eddy of fleeting, surreal thoughts. Central to the book is the absence of any strong plot - many of the sub-stories are linked by nothing more than the author's whim. So you go along the book, much like a life-raft after a shipwreck, bobbing in the middle of the sea. That is not necessarily a bad thing. A patient and relaxed reader can gain considerable enjoyment from this. I can't help feeling like a sleuth, dwelling into the inner minds of the author. Nonetheless, compared to his other books (Austerlitz and The Emigrants), Rings of Saturn was simply too "arbitrary", and felt like a collection of disconnected short stories or afterthoughts, even. There simply wasn't much drive to finish the book, because of its "gaseousness" (dunno if you catch what I mean). Not a book I'd recommend strongly, but you think you've a taste for the strange, then give it a shot.

Rating:
Summary: A WALK AND A TALK TO
Review: part traveloG ON A WALK WHERE? written FRoM A PERSPECTIVE OF SHIFTS held in a guise OF VaRIables APPROACHED, and looked at and passED in a RECOLLECTION OF A WALK.

Rating:
Summary: A Decaying England
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Lord of the Rings
Review: The author engages in a trip through county Suffolk and as he walks he tells us his impressions in a somewhat journalistic style. Like an Ariadna thread the book develops in a quiet and placid manner and he comes and goes from a place and time to other. Everything is subtly connected though sometimes the reader may have the sensation of being confronted with a stream of random thoughts.

For example a railway bridge over river Blyth, built in 1875 takes the author back to 1840 when Opium's war was declared. He ends up telling us the story of the Chinese Empress Cixi and how she betrayed her son, which I found particularly sad and beautiful.

There are also some biographical chapters where the lives of writers such as Conrad or Chateaubriand are portrayed in an exquisite way and here too, Sebald's links dates and facts in a continuous flow of words that transports the reader through mankind history. Even Borges, the best Argentine writer ever born, has a place in Sebald's book, when he refers to a short story called Tlön, Uqbar and Orbius Tertius. Here Borges asserts that mirrors and copulation are both equally repulsive since they multiply human existence. And as the book is built, this idea seems to underlie many of Sebald's reflections.

Sebald shows us a world "made almost only of calamities". However, he writes with no anger, no angst, no arrogance. He speaks like a person who has seen too much and he describes slaughters, wars, imperialism and natural disasters in a way almost resigned.

In the last chapter he depicts Professor Lange's plan for the development of the silk industry and silkworms during Nazi's government. Everything is carefully planned "with the meticulousness inherent to German fascism, which appeared in everything they pursued". He is wise enough not to mention any of the atrocities committed during war. Yet (at least to me) the analogy between the methods used for killing worms and concentration camps is almost transparent.

Rating:
Summary: The Eternal Present
Review: The late W.G. Sebald's "Rings of Saturn" is a meditation on decay. In particular it is about decay whose origins are, one way or another, in imperialism and its concomitant brutalization of the colonized. In the course of this book which seems less a novel than a sequence of allusively related reflections and diary entries, the narrator ambles through East Anglia, looking at the remnants there of empire, of the times when Britannia ruled the waves.

Often it is the once-glorious but now falling-down manor houses, built by those who became rich from England's expansionist era, that set the narrator off on free association about topics ranging from the destruction of China's magnificent imperial gardens (by Europeans who could not tolerate the evidence of unequalled Chinese cultural achievements), to the vagaries of the North Sea herring fishery, to the spread of sericulture (silk worm growing) to the cruelties Belgium's King Leopold in the upper reaches of the Congo. Similarly, the sombre East English scenery leads into meditations on a diverse array of famous people who had some connection, however sinuous, to east Anglia, including writers Joseph Conrad, Algernon Charles Swinburne and François-René de Chateaubriand. No story of tyranny, trade or artistic life, gets out from under theme of things steadily falling apart as a result of their own tragic excesses. "I sensed" the narrator says, pausing to look over the German(North) Sea "quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark."

This is not an uplifting read not at least on its surface. In fact,the narrator tells of his journey a year later and shortly after his recuperation from an unspecified ailment of the kind that we used to call a nervous breakdown. But I think it's well worth risking a small bout of melancholy, to experience, indeed, to study, just how Sebald used the limited cues of a rather bleak and bare countryside to reflect on major themes of world history and entropy, themes that with today's economic globalization trends, are by no means of a bygone era. "Rings of Saturn" inspires me to go take a walk through landscapes near my home and see what they have to tell me, however dreary that be.

Rating:
Summary: Unraveling History's Shroud
Review: There is no literary alembic to condense the vast scope in aim and accomplishment of W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" into a convenient representative snapshot. Those who are familiar with Sebald's work already will find the familiar narrator traveling, this time on foot, without an apparent aim, a past or a future, ruminating about a landscape and its people, present and past.

In "The Emigrants" Sebald's concern seemed to be the undoing of our individual sense of roots, of historical identity. In "The Rings of Saturn" it is history itself that gets displaced in the tales of glory and destruction of empires, countries, social classes, towns, houses, cycles of herring, forests and ancient trees that rise and ebb as the narrator orbits along his path on in Suffolk along the eastern coast of England.

The narrator's drawing forth of historical facts about the Congo, Ireland, the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, the silk trade in China and Europe, as well as his lyrical passages of the lives of people whose lives have been buried in these facts, creates a psycho-mythic arc for these shards of what it means to be human to orbit in our consciousness.

The literal ruins, the torn trees, the fields gone to pasture, the garden of Yuan Ming Yan ablaze, and the literary ruins, such as the impossible tie between Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand or the dream-like lives of the Ashburys in Ireland, all take on a peculiar beauty and vivacity that surpass whatever former and first glory they might have had.

The book starts with an account of the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, the container shard of a mind that searched for "that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration," which Browne, a silk merchant's son, observed in caterpillars and moths. It ends with a return to Thomas Browne's "Musaeum Clausum" or "Bibliotheca Abscondita," a collection of things that, according to Sebald, were "likely the products of his imagination, the inventory of a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letters on his page."

What interests Sebald in Browne's museum of oddities is the bamboo cane in which two friars have smuggled the first silkworm eggs to Europe from China. The thread that ties Sebald's narrator's stories into a pattern emerges in this last chapter on Sir Thomas Browne and on the history of sericulture in Europe, and especially in Germany.

Buried in this last chapter is also a reference from 1822 to an old master dyer named Seybolt, who was employed by the Bavarian Royal Gardens. Perhaps he was one of Sebald's ancestors, thereby tying Sebald's narrator to Sir Thomas Browne in the way in which they both attempt to weave a grand design of humanity from the filament of transmigration.

Rating:
Summary: a gift to humanity
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An Obsessive, Powerful, Dreamlike Narrative
Review: 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."