The Rings of Saturn

by W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (Translator)

Overview

"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 MendelsundA masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter MendelsundThe 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’sThe 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 acclaimsThe Rings of Saturn"an even more inventive work than its predecessor,The Emigrants."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226158
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	66,902
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

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.

Michael Hulse is an English translator, critic, and poet. Hulse has translated more than sixty books from the German.

Editorial Reviews

Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.”

Robert McCrum - The London Observer

Few writers have traveled as quickly from obscurity to the sort of renown that yields an adjective as quickly as German writer W. G. Sebald (1944 - 2001), and nowSebaldianis as evocative asKafkaesque. Sebald is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously refract and magnifymeaning.”

Booklist

The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald's books is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote—as was often remarked—like a ghost. He was one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt exhumed from thenineteenth.

Geoff Dyer

Sublime.

Cynthia Ozick

This is very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful... One of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants.”

James Wood - The New Republic

Think of W.G. Sebald as memory's Einstein.

Richard Eder - Los Angeles Times

In Sebald's writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death... beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald's strange and inscrutablegift.

Slate

An extraordinary palimpsest of nature, human, and literary history.

Merle Rubin - The Wall Street Journal

He is an addiction, and, once button-holed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.

Anthony Lane - The New Yorker

Out of exquisitely attuned feeling for the past, Sebald fashioned an entirely new form of literature. I've read his books countless times trying to understand how he did it. In the end, I can only say that he practiced a kind of magic born out of almost supernaturalsensitivity.

Nicole Krauss

Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing.The Rings of Saturnglows with the radiance and resilience of the humanspirit.”

Roberta Silman - The New York Times Book Review

Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno's dictum that after it, there can be no art.

Richard Eder - The New York Times Book Review

Measured, solemn, sardonic,hypnotic.

Joshua Cohen - The New York Times Book Review

A writer of almost unclassifiable originality, but whose voice we recognize as indispensable and central to ourtime.

The New York Times Book Review

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. The very greatest write of what cannot be written. I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G.Sebald.

The New York Times

Sublime.

Cynthia Ozick - The New Republic

Strange, unquenchable, and serious originality ... A brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay ... It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compellingwork.

Robert McCrum - London Observer

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

Trevor Berrett - The Mookse and the Gripes

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

Rebecca Stott - The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires

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

Marilis Hornidge - Courier-Gazette [Maine]

He is the most hypnotic and exhilarating author. Lyrical and genius. No one like him.

Maira Kalman

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.

The Iconoclast

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.

American Book 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 The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants.”

James Woods - The New Republic

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 - The New York Times

He is the most hypnotic and exhilarating author. Lyrical and genius. No one like him.

Maira Kalman - Museums New York

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

The Mookse and the Gripes

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

The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires

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

The Wall Street Journal

He is the most hypnotic and exhilarating author. Lyrical and genius. No one like him.”— Maira Kalman

Museums New York

This German who has lived in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. . . . And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants.”— James Woods

The New Republic

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

Courier-Gazette [Maine]