The weight of the loss to literature with his early death—of all the books he might have gone on to write—is counterbalanced only by the enigmatic pressure of the work he left behind. His four prose fictions, “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn,” and “Austerlitz” are utterly unique. They combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography in the crucible of his haunting prose style to create a strange new literary compound. Susan Sontag, in a 2000 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, asked whether “literary greatness [was] still possible.” She concluded that “one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.” The title of the book may be associated with thematic content contained in the two passages–one appearing as part of the book's epigraph, the other in the fourth chapter, which mentions Saturn–hinting at both astronomical and mythological associations for Sebald's use of the word: You should read this book,’ Engelhard says, after slurping down some tea. Then he takes the volume from my hands and waves it in the air. Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh (eds.). W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2005. But then, given the impossibility of any uncompromised or just view of history, withdrawal is in a sense the only option. To that extent the frozen planet of melancholy, whose rings, as Sebald's epigraph notes, are composed of the rubble of a destroyed moon, becomes a kind of haven from earthly terror.

The rings of Saturn : Sebald, Winfried Georg, 1944-2001 The rings of Saturn : Sebald, Winfried Georg, 1944-2001

Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.” Grumley, John, "Dialogue with the Dead: Sebald, Creatureliness, and the Philosophy of Mere Life", The European Legacy, 16,4 (2011), 505–518. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks.” Breuer, Theo, "Einer der Besten. W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)" in T.B., Kiesel & Kastanie. Von neuen Gedichten und Geschichten, Edition YE 2008. Sebald, W.G. (1995). Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8218-4448-0.Images of ash point to the world that was lost after Auschwitz, while silk evokes the world that made Auschwitz possible. ‘Silk’ is one of Sebald’s symbols of ‘progress’ and ‘destruction’; it’s linked to the tyranny of mutilating labour (recall the image of the silk weaver strapped into his machine) and melancholy (recall the hunched silk-weaver’s susceptibility to depression). Ash, on the other hand, invokes an ambiguous world existing beneath, and perhaps beyond destruction.

The Rings of Saturn - Penguin Books UK

Throught the rest of the narrative, Sebald scrutinises a series of ruins or decaying spaces, tracing transmigrations, but also a history of complicity with brutality and destruction. There is no more pertinent example of this than the thread of silk the narrator follows down the ages, like Theseus retracing his steps out of the labyrinth after confronting the Minotaur. In a number of interviews, Sebald claimed that his third given name was "Maximilian" – this has, however, turned out not to be the case; see Uwe Schütte, W.G. Sebald. Leben und literarisches Werk. Berlin/Boston, MA: de Gruyter, 2020, p. 8. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade” No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.” Long, J. J. and Anne Whitehead (eds.). W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006.Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the”

Review: The Rings of Saturn - Boston Review Review: The Rings of Saturn - Boston Review

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.” The book is full of strange matter: Sebald records, for example, a 19th-century scientific proposal to turn the phosphorescence of dead herring into a means of urban illumination. But as it proceeds the simple recitation of numbers marks, as it were, a bass line of factual horror: "the Kozara campaign against Tito's partisans . . . in the course of which between sixty and ninety thousand people were killed in so-called acts of war"; "in some parts of the Congo, the indigenous peoples were all but eradicated . . . Every year from 1890 to 1900, an estimated five hundred thousand of these nameless victims . . . lost their lives"; "the Taiping rebellion . . . more than twenty million died in just fifteen years"; and so on. In Sebald's hyperbolic, though all too matter-of-fact, elaboration on Browne's theme, a single English county turns out to contain an inconceivable world of devastation.From this house of mythic stasis the narrator of The Rings of Saturn moves on, traveling next to see an old acquaintance of his called Thomas Abrams, a farmer, a pastor, and, we learn, an avid amateur modeler. Abrams, the narrator recalls, had begun his hobbying career by making replicas of ships and other vessels. But by the time Sebald’s novel takes place he has spent the past twenty years working obsessively on one model, a model of a single building that, when you consider its maker’s résumé, is a most likely subject.

The Rings of Saturn: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse The Rings of Saturn: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse

a b Gussow, Mel (15 December 2001). "W. G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57". The New York Times. Lynne Sharon Shwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald (Seven Stories, 2007).The Rings of Saturn ( German: Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt - An English Pilgrimage) is a 1995 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. Its first-person narrative arc is the account by a nameless narrator (who resembles the author in typical Sebaldian fashion [1]) on a walking tour of Suffolk. In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, including translator Michael Hamburger, Sebald discusses various episodes of history and literature, including the introduction of silkworm cultivation to Europe and the writings of Thomas Browne, which attach in some way to the larger text. The book was published in English in 1998.