8.4 /10 1 Votes
4/5 Barnes & Noble Country Germany Publisher Eichborn Published in English 1998 Translator Michael Hulse Genres Fiction, Novel | 4.3/5 Goodreads Original title Die Ringe des Saturn Language German Publication date 1995 Originally published 1995 Page count 371 Published in english 1998 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar W G Sebald books, Novels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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) 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. A film, Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee and released in 2012, is based on this book.
Contents
Genre and content
Combining the details of a walking tour with meditations prompted by places and people encountered on that tour, The Rings of Saturn was called "a hybrid of a book--fiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir".
Themes and style
Themes in the book are those treated in Sebald's other books: time, memory, and identity. According to Patrick Lennon's "In the Weaver's Web" (and Mark McCulloh's Understanding W. G. Sebald), The Rings of Saturn merges the identities of the Sebaldian narrator with that of Michael Hamburger—Sebald and Hamburger both being German writers who moved to England and shared other important experiences. What's more, Hamburger's identity becomes fused with that of Friedrich Hölderlin, and the merging is emphasized by Sebald's (typical) omission of quotation marks for quotations, further eroding separation of speakers in Sebald's account of the narrator's recollection of Hamburger's recollection.
Title
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:
The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.
As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed a quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the Garden of Cyrus and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn--an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.