Reviews
It Is Full of Wonderfully Rendered Scenes.... Full of Insight and Beauty.... Tragic, Yet Beautiful., As he did so brilliantly in The Emigrants, German author Sebald once again blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in traveling narrator is making his way through the county of Suffolk, England, and from there back in time., Like his much praised novel The Emigrants, this new work by Sebald is steeped in melancholy.... Erudition of this sort is too rare in American fiction, but the hypnotic appeal here has as much to do with Sebalds deft portrait of the subtle, complex relations between individual experience and the rich human firmament that gives it meaning as it does with his remarkable mastery of history., Sebald has been writing what I give the unpromising name thedocumentary novel, in which subject matter becomes character. A futurecritic with considerably more time and space will find Anglia. Seenfrom above, his footsteps will describe, like the good detective he is,the outline of a body that has many times been ferried away, the bodywe call civilization. From these fading contours left upon the land, weLilliputians are left to ponder the shape of what came yesterday, orcenturies before. to such puzzling terrain, is indispensable., This German who has lived in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. . . . And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants., The book is like a dream you want to last translation from the German seems little short of miraculous. The book is so natural and accessible, and yet so odd, that one is left enchanted and also curious about the author, who presents such a prodigious mass of material in such a modest and engaging way. As you read along, and as you become an active participant in the unfolding of this book., [A]lways clear and present--always ringing true, not necessarily comfortable but not easily forgotten., Sebald depicts a landscape that is fascinating and disturbing, a worldwhose minute differences from the actual is a bit of virtuoso reality.If I might be so bold as to sum up his work in one sentence, it isthis: Time always wins, but offers as a consolation and booby prize,Memory. Thus the futility of existence is partially erased by both thegrandeur and inability of our imaginations. We can dream. And somewherein those dreams, reality is defeated., The book is like a dream you want to last translation from the German seems little short of miraculous. The book is so natural and accessible, and yet so odd, that one is left enchanted and also curious about the author, who presents such a prodigious mass of material in such a modest and engaging way. As you read along, and as you become an active participant in the unfolding of this book.
