Out of exquisitely attuned feeling for the past, Sebald fashioned an entirely new form of literature. I’ve read his books countless times trying to understand how he did it. In the end, I can only say that he practiced a kind of magic born out of almost supernatural sensitivity.

Nicole Krauss

The Rings of Saturn

Fiction by W.G. Sebald

Translated from German by Michael Hulse

The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson”, the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII.

Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: “On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”

Paperback(published Nov, 08 2016)

ISBN
9780811226158
Price US
16.95
Trim Size
5 x 8
Page Count
304
Portrait of W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald

German novelist and poet

Out of exquisitely attuned feeling for the past, Sebald fashioned an entirely new form of literature. I’ve read his books countless times trying to understand how he did it. In the end, I can only say that he practiced a kind of magic born out of almost supernatural sensitivity.

Nicole Krauss

A writer of almost unclassifiable originality, but whose voice we recognize as indispensable and central to our time.

The New York Times Book Review

The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald’s books is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote - as was often remarked - like a ghost. He was one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt exhumed from the nineteenth.

Geoff Dyer

Few writers have traveled as quickly from obscurity to the sort of renown that yields an adjective as quickly as German writer W. G. Sebald (1944 - 2001), and now Sebaldian is as evocative as Kafkaesque. Sebald is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously refract and magnify meaning.

Booklist

Sublime.

Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic

Measured, solemn, sardonic, hypnotic.

Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review

In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death… beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny - an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.

Slate

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. The very greatest write of what cannot be written. I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald.

The New York Times

Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art.

Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review

Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. The Rings of Saturn glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit.

Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review

Think of W.G. Sebald as memory’s Einstein.

Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

An extraordinary palimpsest of nature, human, and literary history.

Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.

Robert McCrum, The London Observer

Stunning and strange. Like a dream you want to last forever.

Roberta Silman, The New York Times

This is very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful… One of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants.

James Wood, The New Republic

Sebald is a rare and elusive species, but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Strange, unquenchable, and serious originality … A brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay … It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.

Robert McCrum, London Observer