Sebald continues, ‘Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Duhrer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction…’ Janine, for whatever reason, has taken on this quality of assuredness in the face of the chaos that surrounds her; and Michael seems to have occupied a similar symbolic function — one of refuge from dark, contemporary forces — in the narrator’s consciousness. Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose. Given how intense my focus on this project was, it’s odd that I now neither know nor care what became of the elements that I had finished.

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history

He visits a man who has devoted years of his life to constructing a perfect replica of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (an episode that, like much else in the book, echoes The Emigrants, where the painter Max Ferber describes a childhood meeting with a Jewish itinerant who went from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting such a model: "And I, said Ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like.The works of Jorge Luis Borges, especially " The Garden of Forking Paths" and " Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", were a major influence on Sebald.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse - Waterstones

Sir Thomas Browne, Sebald notes at the beginning of the book, remarks on the fabled survival, over the centuries, of a piece of silk in the urn of Patroclus, for Browne a "symbol of the indestructibility of the human soul as assured by scripture.The narrator identifies with Janine as much as with Parkinson, if not more; he too is ‘guided by a fascination for obscure detail rather than by the self-evident.

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

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. The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward the sun before turning west. The narrator is a version of Sebald but not quite the same as the flesh-and-blood author, and I suspect, in a paranoid way, that even the photograph of Sebald posing casually in front of a Lebanese cedar, near the end of the chronicle, is in some way distorted—perhaps reversed, as in a mirror image.

According to Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès' "The Ruin of Kairos" 'Sebald's intermedial narrative is ruination at work, but ruination as a preliminary to the experience of kairos, i. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Perhaps, as Browne says in a later note about the great fog that shrouded large parts of England and Holland on the 27th of November 1674, it was the white mist that rises from within a body opened presently after death, and which during our lifetime, so he adds, clouds our brain when asleep and dreaming.

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (z-lib.org The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (z-lib.org

That place and what it has come to represent is a vast and blank presence at the periphery—and yet somehow at the center—of narrative vision in Sebald’s work. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. The books are fascinating for the way they inhabit their own self-determined genre, but that’s not ultimately why they are essential reading. The coroner's report, released some six months after the accident, stated that Sebald had suffered a heart attack and had died of this condition before his car swerved across the road and collided with an oncoming lorry.From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. Abrams mournfully concludes his conversation by sharing with the narrator his realization that that no amount of reproduction can hope to capture the original. But I’m wary of pushing things too far – I expect that as we fall deeper into the book, plenty of other ways of reading and seeing the book will suggest themselves.