The Rings of Saturn

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I do not know how to read this except as the book disowning itself, observing, as best it can, the decencies of mourning with a gesture towards the renunciation not only of memory, but of experience itself. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.”

The Rings of Saturn: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse The Rings of Saturn: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse

Sebald's 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 people. In On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), he wrote an essay on the wartime bombing of German cities and the absence in German writing of any real response. His concern with The Holocaust is expressed in several books delicately tracing his own biographical connections with Jews. [21] Contrary to Germany's political and intellectual establishment, [22] Sebald denied the singularity of the Holocaust: "I see the catastrophe caused by the Germans, dreadful as it was, by no means as a singular event – it developed with a certain logic from European history and then, for the same reason, ate itself into European history." [23] Consequently, Sebald, in his literary work, always tried to situate and contextualize the Holocaust within modern European history, even avoiding a focus on Germany. What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. For all that, the book's tenor is muted. Sebald is strangely removed from the ruin he obsessively envisions and combs over: PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Rings_of_Saturn_-_Winfried_Georg_Sebald.pdf, The_Rings_of_Saturn_-_Winfried_Georg_Sebald.epub

You should read this book,’ Engelhard says, after slurping down some tea. Then he takes the volume from my hands and waves it in the air. Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.” Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (ed.). W. G. Sebald. Munich, 2003 ( Text+Kritik. Zeitschrift für Literatur. IV, 158). Includes bibliography. A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears Teju Cole, Guardian He himself was now the battlefield on which the downfall of China was being accomplished, till on the 22nd of the month the shades of night settled upon him and he sank away wholly into the delirium of death.”

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history

The next major mediating presence in the chronicle, or fog in the mirror, is Thomas Browne, the son of a silk merchant, the melancholy essayist who may have once witnessed the gruesome dissection of the thief, Aris Kindt, ‘before a paying public drawn from the upper classes,’ as represented by Rembrandt in his painting of the Guild of Surgeons — capturing, as Sebald has it — by way of a genealogical method akin to Foucault’s, ‘a demonstration of the undaunted investigative zeal in the new sciences; but,’ he continues, ‘it also represented (though this surely would have been refuted) the archaic ritual of dismembering a corpse, of harrowing the flesh of the delinquent even beyond death, a procedure then still part of the ordained punishment.’ The underside of scientific progress is presented as medieval punishment played out almost unconsciously, just as the underside of artistic production is shown to be the working-to-death of Congolese slaves in far-off Africa for the sugar and rubber industry. Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, oil on canvas, 216.5 cm × 169.5 cm. Though later, visiting a panoramic depiction of the battle of Waterloo, this remove becomes an object of moral scrutiny:Winfried Georg Sebald [1] (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors. [2] Life [ edit ] Throught the rest of the narrative, Sebald scrutinises a series of ruins or decaying spaces, tracing transmigrations, but also a history of complicity with brutality and destruction. There is no more pertinent example of this than the thread of silk the narrator follows down the ages, like Theseus retracing his steps out of the labyrinth after confronting the Minotaur. On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Hamish Hamilton. ( Luftkrieg und Literatur: Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch) English ed. 2003 Among Kafka's Sons: Sebald, Roth, Coetzee", 22 January 2013; review of Three Sons by Daniel L. Medin, ISBN 978-0810125681 Breuer, Theo, "Einer der Besten. W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)" in T.B., Kiesel & Kastanie. Von neuen Gedichten und Geschichten, Edition YE 2008.

W. G. Sebald - Wikipedia W. G. Sebald - Wikipedia

The works of Jorge Luis Borges, especially " The Garden of Forking Paths" and " Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", were a major influence on Sebald. (Tlön and Uqbar appear in The Rings of Saturn.) [27] In a conversation during his final year, Sebald named Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean Paul as his literary models. [28] He also credited the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard as a major influence on his work, [29] and paid homage within his work to Kafka [30] and Nabokov (the figure of Nabokov appears in every one of the four sections of The Emigrants). [31] Memorials [ edit ] Sebaldweg ("Sebald Way") [ edit ] At the end of Rings, the narrator informs us that the Nazis were responsible for reviving the faltering sericulture industry in Germany. Such is the silken spiral of chronicle, and it leads ultimately to the camps, where the ash, silk, burials, and brutal experiments on animals (and implicitly, of course, on humans) all merge. Sericulture was advocated in Nazi Germany, says the narrator, on the grounds that silkworms And yet for all that The Rings of Saturnalso displays a frightening, almost inhuman, conviction. Sir Thomas Browne, Sebald notes at the beginning of the book, remarks on the fabled survival, over the centuries, of a piece of silk in the urn of Patroclus, for Browne a "symbol of the indestructibility of the human soul as assured by scripture." Silk and its manufacture, as I have said, is an ongoing preoccupation throughout the book. Echoing Browne, this symbolizes the curious inter-relation of the corrupt and the incorruptible; equally it is a metaphor for how the book itself weaves separate threads into its singular substance. At the end, however, the theme is simply funereal.It’s at this point I have to confess that the past 12 months have been a year of my own miserable thinking. Perhaps that’s why I disappeared so readily into The Rings of Saturn. But rather than reinforcing my mood, I found solace in Sebald’s. It may be despondent and worn down but it is not cynical, it is not blind to beauty and, at its heart, it carries an invigorating dedication to truth. All of which should perhaps inspire me to establish whether I really did go to Southwold when I was young and, if I did, what the food was like.