The Rings of Saturn

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a b Gussow, Mel (15 December 2001). "W. G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57". The New York Times.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald | Goodreads

Book Genre: 20th Century, British Literature, Cultural, Essays, European Literature, Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Travel, WritingThat odd youthful pastime of mine is no doubt why I was so strongly affected by a certain passage toward the end of a novel called The Rings of Saturn, originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn, by the late W. G. Sebald, the German writer who had emigrated in the sixties to the United Kingdom, where he spent the rest of his life and which is the setting for much of his writing. It was in England that Sebald wrote his dissertation, in English, on another German writer, Alfred Döblin, author of the masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz and a Jewish refugee from Hitler—just as was, for example, the great scholar Erich Auerbach, whose magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature begins with an analysis of the looping, digressive style, known as ring composition, that is found in Homer’s Odyssey. Döblin and Auerbach, in fact, died within weeks of each other, in 1957: the kind of near-coincidence beloved of Sebald, as we shall see. And yeah, I most definitely don’t *get* it. I’m probably too much of a goal-oriented reader and not sophisticated enough to fully immerse myself in evocative beauty of the writing. I can’t keep my mind from wandering off, distracted by all the digressions.

Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald | The New Yorker Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald | The New Yorker

But he is not simply a storyteller or a detached analytic looking at people and locations under the microscope and connecting threads. Sometimes Sebald is overwhelmed by what he is seeing as well, and that is where the fanciful feeling I mentioned earlier comes out. There are plenty of moments of stillness where Sebald weaves his imagination through what he sees, embroidering what he experiences so it is lifted it out of quotidian worries like flies in the marshlands and cold in your feet and into the realm of dreams: There’s no sure answer, but within the dramatic scope of this narrative, the deaths of Michael and Janine, occurring between his surgery and the process of assembling his notes for the chronicle, mark the elaboration, at least, of the narrator’s fissure; their deaths cast a particular fog over his world, his memory, and his experience, and from this point on the dominant mode is melancholy edging towards despair. In a foreword to one of his collections of essays on Austrian literature, Sebald wrote of the melancholic literary mode:urn:lcp:ringsofsaturn00seba:epub:13bd06d4-5a90-42c0-b458-45507e1d22a0 Extramarc Brown University Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier ringsofsaturn00seba Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7gq7sz01 Isbn 0811213781 Lccn 97047578 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition c]ould be used [in classrooms] to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and the essential measures which are taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration.