The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald


finished 5/28 ...... late 20th cent. European ......... rating 6

I'm sure that this is a marvelous book but it's just not my cup of tea. For one thing, it's really hard to read because there are no paragraph breaks - which may contribute to the theme - I know. The book still strikes me as a literary and historical travelogue of sorts with a lot more thinking than usual. There's a sense of sadness for what all has gone before and is now perhaps lost and that Sebald tries to remember.

I guess The Rings of Saturn is a meditation on the relationship between the past and the present more than anything, and the fictional aspect is the vehicle for Sebald's meditations. The narrator (Sebald?) is lying in his hospital bed remembering a long walk he took around the area of his home in East Anglia, England. In meditating on this the narrator relates the historical incidents and present environment. Characters from both history and the walk itself are in his mind. He thinks about Rembrandt and Joseph Conrad and King Leopold and the Empress Dowager of China and Roger Casement and Chateaubriand and Sir Thomas Browne and other people and things. Most of the characters described were afflicted with some ailment or another as was the narrator at the end of his travels.

There is so much of an historical nature here that it's tempting to think of it as a book of non-fiction history, but it's certainly not that (at all) for a couple reasons.

First, the book is listed as a novel by the publisher. That tells us that the author does not really want this book taken as an addition to the body of knowledge on the subject and he doesn't want it criticized regarding sources or data. Well, of course he doesn't. Sebald has written a valuable literary work which happens to include historical information and ideas. We are not specifically invited to "check the facts" (no source materials) although I think Sebald would like to spur some interest. As an American I didn't know who some of the places or who the characters were (Swinburne, Thomas Browne) and I sensed that Sebald felt I should have this as background knowledge so I had to look it up.

Second, quite different from history books but not so much for fiction, the narrative is written with almost no paragraph breaks in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style. Even where there are paragraph breaks, the indentation is only equal to about two letters. So this narrative just flows along probably to simulate history and the countryside and his life as well as his thoughts. "Everything is connected and everything flows." Rather than writing a book of history (which Sebald has done ) , Robert Silman (NY Times) says Sebald is working in the "Eternal Present" of which his hero Sir Thomas Browne wrote. And the narrator (along with some historical person) worries that his writings will, like the works and deeds of so many people he mentioned, be obliterated by time.

It reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul but Sebald does not keep to the history of the local area as Pamuk does and Pamuk has an entirely different theme. There seems to be the same sense of melancholy, though, of decay and deterioration as the authors/narrators try to connect the dots of history and place. Both books use photographs and other graphics throughout. By the way, Istanbul is classified as a memoir (which means that he's the narrator and we can generally check the facts of his life). And the spirit of Nabokov occured to me in the section dealing with butterflies toward the end. (But I always think of Nabokov when I see butterflies.)

I didn't much care for The Rings of Saturn because Sebald just flows (rambles?) on and on. This was hard on the brain as well as the eyes. I know there was a lot more (see this article ) than I got.

Posted: Mon - May 28, 2007 at 09:45 AM        

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