The Rings of Saturn"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund 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 which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants." |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - amerynth - LibraryThingW.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" is a odd little book. I didn't have a particularly strong reaction to it -- neither positive nor negative -- so I guess it gets an okay rating from me. Our narrator ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - PilgrimJess - LibraryThing“Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.” On one level this book is a kind of travelogue as the author embarks on ... Read full review
Contents
Fishermen on the beach The natural history of the herring George | |
The Battle of Sole Bay Nightfall Station Road in The Hague | |
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Common terms and phrases
already amidst Aris Kindt Ashbury Bawdsey beach body Boulge Bredfield Browne Browne’s building Casement century clouds coast Congo dark dead death deserted Ditchingham Ditchingham Hall dream Dunwich earth empty entire everything eyes felt fields fire fish FitzGerald garden Garden of Cyrus gaze German green grey hall hand head hour hundred Janine kind knew Konrad Korzeniowski land later light lived looked Lowestoft Matadi Michael morning mulberry night North Sea Norwich once one’s Orford palace park perhaps reached recall remained seemed sericulture Shingle Street silk cultivation silkworms sitting snowwhite Somerleyton Southwold standing stone stood strange Suffolk summer Swinburne Taiping rebellion Temple things Thomas Abrams Thomas Browne thought thousand Tlön took towers town travelled trees turn Vicomte W. G. Sebald walked walls window writing wrote yards
Bibliographic information
| Title | The Rings of Saturn |
| Author | W. G. Sebald |
| Translated by | Michael Hulse |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing, 2016 |
| ISBN | 081122130X, 9780811221306 |
| Length | 304 pages |
| Subjects | › › Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures Fiction / Literary History / Modern / 20th Century Travel / Essays & Travelogues |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |