Synopses & Reviews
Ostensiblya record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, asRobert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings ofSaturn is also a brilliantly allusive study of England'simperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay.. . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might sayhypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or morecompelling work. The Rings of Saturn - with its curiousarchive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well ascountryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabitingtumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson,the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Templeof Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massivebombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connectssugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the BelgianCongo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridgeover the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and thesilk industry in Norwich. Sebald, as The New Yorkerstated, weaves his tale together with a complexity and historicalsweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction. TheEmigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an astonishing masterpiece-perfectwhile being unlike any book one has ever read) was one ofthe great books of the last few years, as Michael Ondaatje noted: and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strangea triumph.
Synopsis
'Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century' The Times
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.
'A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas... 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