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A review by funeraryarts
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
3.0
The erudition in history, the insights about memory, time, decay, violence and Sebald's artistically melancholic yet laberynthic voice (always branching into revealing tangents) are impossible to deny. However his tone is overwhelmingly pessimistic and nostalgic, he presents us a very dark side of history without the accompanying beauty that has been the better representative of human nature.
In opposition to Baudelaire who was capable of finding poetic beauty in the most wretched subjects, Sebald conjures up death and sadness out every landscape and memory he revisits during the Rings of Saturn. I feel that in his efforts to be comprehensive about a shared history of loss Sebald ends up sounding at times like wallowing in the misery of the human race without proposing any solutions and not even possesing any visible hope. That might be a failure of expectations on my part to assume he'd do something else other than lay out a comprehensive history of infamy.
I appreciated his methods in the artistry of writing but this book is like conversing with someone interested in talking only about the worst aspects of people, tiring after a while. History itself might be harming the impact of this book. It might be that in 1995 the facts and themes touched here were uncomfortable for European and Americans world wide but in 2023 who hasn't heard of the evils of racism, antisemitism, colonialism or classism ad nauseam?
In opposition to Baudelaire who was capable of finding poetic beauty in the most wretched subjects, Sebald conjures up death and sadness out every landscape and memory he revisits during the Rings of Saturn. I feel that in his efforts to be comprehensive about a shared history of loss Sebald ends up sounding at times like wallowing in the misery of the human race without proposing any solutions and not even possesing any visible hope. That might be a failure of expectations on my part to assume he'd do something else other than lay out a comprehensive history of infamy.
I appreciated his methods in the artistry of writing but this book is like conversing with someone interested in talking only about the worst aspects of people, tiring after a while. History itself might be harming the impact of this book. It might be that in 1995 the facts and themes touched here were uncomfortable for European and Americans world wide but in 2023 who hasn't heard of the evils of racism, antisemitism, colonialism or classism ad nauseam?