The Rings of Saturn

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Patt, Lise et al. (eds.). Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald. ICI Press, 2007. An anthology of essays on Sebald's use of images, with artist's projects inspired by Sebald. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.” Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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

Combining the details of a walking tour with meditations prompted by places and people encountered on that tour, The Rings of Saturn was called "a hybrid of a book–fiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir". [2] Themes and style [ edit ] Christian Hein, 'Rezeption | Deutschsprachiger Raum'. In: Claudia Öhlschläger, Michael Niehaus (eds.), W.G. Sebald-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, pp. 300–305, p. 300: " Austerlitz wurde international begeistert rezipiert, von der Literaturkritik frenetisch gefeiert und verlieh Sebald den Status eines modernen Klassikers." W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001. Martin, James R. (2013). "On Misunderstanding W.G. Sebald" (PDF). Cambridge Literary Review. IV (7): 123–38. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 March 2016 . Retrieved 4 March 2016. Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh (eds.). W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2005.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the SRB to help us maintain a vigorous program with no paywall. 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.

The Rings of Saturn opens on to a dizzy range of allusions

Breuer, Theo, "Einer der Besten. W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)" in T.B., Kiesel & Kastanie. Von neuen Gedichten und Geschichten, Edition YE 2008. Gutbrod, Hans (31 May 2023). "Sebald's Path in Wertach -- Commemorating the Commemorator". Cultures of History Forum. doi: 10.25626/0146 . Retrieved 6 June 2023. In the narrator’s case, the thread that is supposed to lead him away from the psychological Minotaur instead brings him face-to-face with the monster’s historical double, since a series of brutalities in China, the former Yugoslavia, the Congo and India are associatively linked to the Holocaust. For a German of Sebald’s generation — and, we might add, for anyone who can trace their beginnings to political, social or economic oppression — there is no way out of this labyrinth. Book Genre: 20th Century, British Literature, Cultural, Essays, European Literature, Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Travel, Writing Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001. ( Über das Land und das Wasser. Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964–2001.) English ed. 2012Unfortunately 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.” There are a few things to note. First, this is just a rough list; providing the full tally of allusions and references would take up as much space as the chapter itself, and it’s far better just to enjoy Michael Hulse’s wonderfully smooth translation. Second, many of the items in this list are portals to further exploration: more allusions, more stories, more rabbit holes. Miller, A. D. (Spring 2011). "Notes on a Voice: W. G. Sebald". Intelligent Life . Retrieved 9 June 2013.

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

The book is full of strange matter: Sebald records, for example, a 19th-century scientific proposal to turn the phosphorescence of dead herring into a means of urban illumination. But as it proceeds the simple recitation of numbers marks, as it were, a bass line of factual horror: "the Kozara campaign against Tito's partisans . . . in the course of which between sixty and ninety thousand people were killed in so-called acts of war"; "in some parts of the Congo, the indigenous peoples were all but eradicated . . . Every year from 1890 to 1900, an estimated five hundred thousand of these nameless victims . . . lost their lives"; "the Taiping rebellion . . . more than twenty million died in just fifteen years"; and so on. In Sebald's hyperbolic, though all too matter-of-fact, elaboration on Browne's theme, a single English county turns out to contain an inconceivable world of devastation. 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.

Silman, Roberta (26 July 1998). "In the Company of Ghosts A novel uses a walking tour in East Anglia to meditate on links between past and present, East and West". The New York Times . Retrieved 9 June 2013. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks.” Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York, NY/London/Melbourne/Toronto 2007, p. 162.