Synopses & Reviews
"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the noted, "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now is a similar and as strange a triumph."
Review
"[A]lways clear and present--always ringing true, not necessarily comfortable but not easily forgotten." Marilis Hornidge
Review
"This German who has lived in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. . . . And here, in , is a book more uncanny than ." Courier-Gazette [Maine]
Review
"The book is like a dream you want to last
Review
Sebald has been writing what I give the unpromising name the documentary novel, in which subject matter becomes character. A future critic with considerably more time and space will find Anglia. Seen from above, his footsteps will describe, like the good detective he is, the outline of a body that has many times been ferried away, the body we call civilization. From these fading contours left upon the land, we Lilliputians are left to ponder the shape of what came yesterday, or centuries before. to such puzzling terrain, is indispensable.Sebald depicts a landscape that is fascinating and disturbing, a world whose minute differences from the actual is a bit of virtuoso reality. If I might be so bold as to sum up his work in one sentence, it is this: Time always wins, but offers as a consolation and booby prize, Memory. Thus the futility of existence is partially erased by both the grandeur and inability of our imaginations. We can dream. And somewhere in those dreams, reality is defeated.He is the most hypnotic and exhilarating author. Lyrical and genius. No one like him. -- Maira Kalman
Review
Like his much praised novel The Emigrants, this new work by Sebald is steeped in melancholy.... Erudition of this sort is too rare in American fiction, but the hypnotic appeal here has as much to do with Sebalds deft portrait of the subtle, complex relations between individual experience and the rich human firmament that gives it meaning as it does with his remarkable mastery of history.As he did so brilliantly in The Emigrants, German author Sebald once again blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in traveling narrator is making his way through the county of Suffolk, England, and from there back in time.[A]n extraordinary palimpsest of nature, human, and literary history. -- Merle Rubin
Review
One of 'Five Best [of the year].' Historical fiction of the first rank. -- Rebecca Stott
Review
It is full of wonderfully rendered scenes'. Full of insight and beauty'. Tragic, yet beautiful. -- Trevor Berrett
Review
"The book is like a dream you want to last
Review
"The book is like a dream you want to last
Review
"The book is like a dream you want to last
Synopsis
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."
Synopsis
Shortlisted for the 1998 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,
About the Author
W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.