The Rings of Saturn - Hardcover

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

[A]n extraordinary palimpsest of nature, human, and literary history.--Merle Rubin

One of 'Five Best [of the year].' Historical fiction of the first rank.--Rebecca Stott

The book is like a dream you want to last translation from the German seems little short of miraculous. The book is so natural and accessible, and yet so odd, that one is left enchanted and also curious about the author, who presents such a prodigious mass of material in such a modest and engaging way. As you read along, and as you become an active participant in the unfolding of this book.--Roberta Silman

[A]lways clear and present--always ringing true, not necessarily comfortable but not easily forgotten.--Marilis Hornidge

It is full of wonderfully rendered scenes.... Full of insight and beauty.... Tragic, yet beautiful.--Trevor Berrett

"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."