The Rings of Saturn
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4.3 • 27 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"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
A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, 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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As he did so brilliantly in The Emigrants, German author Sebald once again blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in this meditative work. Sebald's unnamed, traveling narrator is making his way through the county of Suffolk, England, and from there back in time. We learn that he has recently been hospitalized, an event that "marked the beginning of a fissure that has since riven my life." Sunk in his own thoughts, he becomes obsessed with the ubiquitous evidence of disintegration he views in the landscape and history of the small coastal towns, from the moribund herring industry to the lost art of silk production. He spirals deeper into his own considerably learned historical memory to explore, for example, slavery, the Chinese opium wars, Joseph Conrad's life on the high seas and Chateaubriand's memories of estranged love. It comes as no surprise that the "parlous loftiness" of the 17th-century metaphysician Thomas Browne holds particular fascination for our narrator who, like Browne, writes "out of the fullness of his erudition," pursuing his train of thought in sentences "that resemble processions or a funeral cortege in their sheer ceremonial lavishness." Numerous photographs that illustrate the people, places and objects discussed in the text add to the curious beauty of this brooding, elegiac novel.
Customer Reviews
Review of This eBook Version
(This review is NOT about Sebald's work--which is fascinating and rich and unexpected and an amazing read--but instead, is about this version of the eBook).
I am appalled at how many typos there are in this digital version! This is startlingly unprofessional. There are numerous misspellings that would be caught with even the crudest of spell-check programs. In the first third of the book there are more than 20 non-sensical typos; these are distracting and inexcusable.
The photos in the book are also not well handled. Somehow, they don't adapt to the screen size, so if they don't fit on a page, they'll get shifted to the next page, often in silly and graphically unattractive ways. This, too, is distracting.
Why has a level of quality control that is held in the highest regard in print publication been so blatantly disregarded with digital?
Great book, careless publisher
Five stars for the work, one for this eBook. Laughable typos throughout mar a great work.
Should be titled: Not the Rings of Saturn
I have no idea what it’s talking about.