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amanuensis 's review for:
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
At its most basic, the Rings of Saturn is a travelogue of a morose walking vacation down the Norfolk coast, where you get to learn very interesting things about, among others, the history of the herring fisheries in the Black Sea, the life of the Empress Dowager Cixi and the waning years of the Qing dynasty, the early life of Joseph Conrad and his family history of political resistance, the family life of Edward Fitzgerald, and the various state policies that explain where sericulture did or did not flourish in Europe. This is of course why it is difficult to round up what is perhaps the most exemplary of all of Sebalds novels, concerned as it is with so many disparate threads and tangents, but of course the elliptical skein of its progress is one of the core ways Sebald ultimately dissects his subject. As Sebald himself had commented, his novels have as one of their principal concerns the Holocaust, and the sheer indescribability of the horror, especially for Germans of his generation, birthed into a world strewn with its ruins, such that language itself breaks down when attempting to address head-on the catastrophe. So Sebald circles around it, an orbiting satellite observing the ruins of time and history from other, more comprehensible periods, in order to adumbrate what lies at the core of his concerns, via analogy, via an exploration of resonant overtones, to reveal without words a fundamental note.
However, this is not the great Sebaldian treatment of the Holocaust (which is of course Austerlitz), and while even here, it is made clear that the Holocaust lies at the heart of his psycho-geographic labyrinth, it is the process of noticing that seems to most preoccupy Sebald, the minutiae hidden within the ruins of time, as the seemingly inescapable process of entropy subsumes vital human effort. But there too seems to be a process of resuscitation imbedded in this archeological (or perhaps necromantic) process of noticing, wherein minutiae carry through time some essence of their previous lives.
However, this is not the great Sebaldian treatment of the Holocaust (which is of course Austerlitz), and while even here, it is made clear that the Holocaust lies at the heart of his psycho-geographic labyrinth, it is the process of noticing that seems to most preoccupy Sebald, the minutiae hidden within the ruins of time, as the seemingly inescapable process of entropy subsumes vital human effort. But there too seems to be a process of resuscitation imbedded in this archeological (or perhaps necromantic) process of noticing, wherein minutiae carry through time some essence of their previous lives.