"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
The Rings of Saturn is his record of these travels, a phantasmagoria of fragments and memories, fraught with dizzying knowledge and desperation and shadowed by mortality. As in The Emigrants, past and present intermingle: the living come to seem like supernatural apparitions while the dead are vividly present. Exemplary sufferers such as Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement people the author's solitude along with various eccentrics and even an occasional friend. Indeed, one of the most moving chapters concerns his fellow German exile--the writer Mi chael Hamburger.
"How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being or, if not oneself, then one's own precursor?" Sebald asks. "The fact that I first passed through British customs 33 years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol--none of these things are particularly strange. But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer ..."
Sebald seems most struck by those who lived or live quietly in adversity, "the shadow of annihilation" always hanging over them. The appropriately surnamed George Wyndham Le Strange, for example, remained on his vast property in increasing isolation, his life turning into a series of colourful anecdotes. He was "reputed to have been surrounded, in later years, by all manner of feathered creatures: by guinea fowl, pheasants, pigeons and quail, and various kinds of garden and song birds, strutting about him on the floor or flying around in the air. Some said that one summer Le Strange dug a cave in his garden and sat in it day and night like St. Jerome in the desert."
In Sebald's eyes, even the everyday comes to seem extraterrestrial--a vision intensified in Michael Hulse's beautiful rendition. His complex, allusive sentences are encased in several-pages-long paragraphs-- style and subject making for painful, exquisite reading. Though most often hypersensitive to human (and animal) suffering and making few concessions to obligatory cheeriness, Sebald is not without humour. At one point, paralysed by the presence of the past, he admits: "I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel." The Rings of Saturn is a challenging nocturne and the second of Sebald's four books to appear in English. - -Kerry Fried
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
£ 2.09
Within U.S.A.
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 313800-n
Book Description Hardback or Cased Book. Condition: New. The Rings of Saturn 1.13. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780811213783
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # ABLIING23Feb2416190218677
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 9780811213783
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0811213781
Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # newMercantile_0811213781
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # I-9780811213783
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Brand New! This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 0811213781
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII. Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: "On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation." 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 Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780811213783
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # DADAX0811213781