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Title: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse ISBN: 0-8112-1413-3 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (31 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: An Obsessive, Powerful, Dreamlike Narrative
Comment: 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."

Rating: 5
Summary: An Obsessive, Powerful, Dreamlike Narrative
Comment: 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."

Rating: 5
Summary: A WALK AND A TALK TO
Comment: 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.

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