Fa venire in mente un appassionato rigattiere che si muove nel suo negozio pieno di carabattole, ma per lui gioielli preziosi, cose di altri, e di tutto conosce la storia, il percorso, la vita. Come si vede nella magnifica foto riproposta in copertina, calza stivali di cuoio, invece di scarpe da trekking - racchiude le sue cose in uno zaino informe invece di quelli anatomici. Niente abbigliamento e oggetti tecnici che possano agevolare il cammino e l’andare, l’aspetto che domina rimanda a un tempo che fu. Sebald detaches us from reality, even as he feeds increasing amounts of earthy and apparently true material into the book. He makes us feel like there is far more in the Suffolk landscape than we could ever have imagined – and also that he’s imagining plenty of it. Or rather, the imaginary version of him is imagining it. Austerlitz is to some extent anomalous among Sebald’s novels precisely because of its explicit mention of the German extermination of the Jews of Europe, which haunts his other narratives without ever quite being made explicit. To my knowledge there is only one time in Sebald’s work that the word holocaust occurs, and there it refers not to what Germany did to the Jews but to what, in the Book of Genesis, Abraham intends to do to Isaac. In a typically digressive passage in The Rings of Saturn, which indeed consists of nothing but digressions, a series of tales that both describe and mirror its narrator’s meandering walks around the East Coast of England during a period of inexplicable depression, the narrator muses on the 1658 work by Thomas Browne called Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, whose discussion of how easy it is to burn human bodies is paraphrased at one point: His inability either to read or to move seems to sum up Sebald’s own project, in which language fails and motion is pointless. Everything is left in obscurity.

Dvoglave zmije amfisbena. Komadić mora s plovećim santama leda, na kojima sjede morski konji, medvjedi, lisice i divlje ptice. Metode mučenja u Turskoj prilikom izricanja smrtne kazne: skraćivanje tijela dio po dio. O, Adame! Satürn’ün Halkaları” için modern çağın Binbirgece Masalları diyebiliriz. Kelebek misali bir masaldan öbür masala uçuluyor. Onlarca farklı hikaye, okunurken şiirsel ve yumuşak, okunduktan sonra ise demir gibi sert mesajı olan cümleleriyle 10 ana başlıkta toplanarak anlatılmış. Aralara yazarın seçimiyle konulan fotoğraflar ile okuyucu kitabın içine davet ediliyor. Bazıları gerçek bazıları düş olan anlatılarda geçmiş ile bugün, karşılıklı tutulan ayna görüntüleri gibi iç içe geçiyor, üst üste biniyor. Ya da eskiden gezegenin çok yakınlarında bulunan ve etkisinde kaldığı gelgit nedeniyle yok olan bir uydunun parçaları olan Satürn halkalarına dönüyor. This is allegedly a novel (it doesn’t feel like it). It has a first person narrator and it an account of and reflections on a walking tour in East Anglia (mainly Suffolk): from Lowestoft to Ditchingham. It describes places and people along the way, mainly people living in fairly large country houses! There are lots of tangents with passages on silkworm rearing and its history (there is a history of it in East Anglia), the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, the history of herring fishing in the North Sea, colonialism in the Congo with Conrad and Casement prominent, the description of a dissection viewed by Browne and Rembrandt, forays in Chateaubriand, Swinburne and Morton Peto follow. It does look at our relationship with the environment and makes a few pertinent points:

Retailers:

I persevere with Sebald but the contrivance of it, particularly his un-peopling of the landscape, never fails to irritate. ‘It was already afternoon, six in the evening when I reached the outskirts of Lowestoft. Not a living soul was about in the long streets.’ . . . The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance.”

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: This is, in a way, also what Sebald is up to. His remembrance of his walk through Suffolk is essentially a series of mini-essays, digging up archeological memories from his own mind and the landscape he sees around him, fading in and out of the present sometimes as often as he turns his head for a better view. The subjects of these digressions range from a straightforward history of a formerly glorious manor home he comes across on his first walk, a discussion of Joseph Conrad of Heart of Darkness fame, inspired by the tragic case of Roger Casement, the sad tale of formerly bustling, repeatedly washed out Dunwich, an isolated craftsman working on a famous, minute replica of the Temple at Jerusalem, a sketched portrait of Swinburne and tales of the last days of the Chinese empire. The essay are sometimes analytical in tone, sometimes they take the form of a New Yorker-like story with commentary interspersed, and occasionally we are even offered scenes of drama or fanciful feeling.

Select a format:

This becomes both a jumping off point for a descriptive essay on Swinburne, one of these poets, and, I think, perhaps a way for Sebald to analyze his own motives in undertaking a journey similar to men of a very different age, with quite different priorities and sensibilities. What is it that attracted them? stands in for "Why am I here?" The difficulty of representing the past accurately—even if that past is itself a dream, a reconstruction of a reconstruction, a palimpsest of a palimpsest—is one known to people other than writers, of course. I was a fervent model-maker in my early teenage years, often devoting all of my after-school time to making intricate reproductions of buildings from antiquity. Of these, the Parthenon was the object of an almost obsessive interest. After making my first model of it for a class project when I was about twelve, using cardboard toilet paper rolls to stand in for the original’s elegantly fluted Doric columns, I embarked on creating a proper scale model, three feet wide by six feet long, the ambitiousness of which now strikes me as almost absurd and the construction of which was never completed, although it absorbed the next five years of my life. During that period my skills improved. I studied dozens of books and, eventually, created elaborate rubber molds from which I could cast the forty-six columns of the peristyle and other architectural elements. I reproduced as meticulously as I was able the bas-reliefs of the frieze, which I worked in Plasticine on inch-high strips of cardboard, and the great chryselephantine statue of Athena, which in my three-feet-to-an-inch scale rendering was thirteen inches high, cast in plaster, and adorned with real gold leaf. W.G. Sebald resides in the intellectual world so any event in his life brings up some literary, cultural or historical reminiscences… Consequently, the author tells the tale of his hiking along the eastern coast of England in the truly Borgesian traditions so the story of his journey becomes as picturesque and exotic as if he travelled about The Rings of Saturn…