The Rings of Saturn
The Rings of Saturn
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$11.65
Condition - Very Good
1 In stock
Regular price
$11.65
Condition - Very Good
1 In stock
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Summary
A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund
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The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald
A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia, Sebald's home for more than twenty years, The Rings of Saturn explores Britain's pastoral and imperial past. Its ten strange and beautiful chapters, with their curious archive of photographs, consider dreams and reality. As the narrator walks, a company of ghosts keeps him company - Thomas Browne, Swinburne, Chateaubriand, Joseph Conrad, Borges - conductors between the past and present. The narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions, and hears of the furious coastal battles of two world wars. He tells of far-off China and the introduction of the silk industry to Norwich. He walks to the now forsaken harbor where Conrad first set foot on English soil and visits the site of the once-great city of Dunwich, now sunk in the sea, where schools of herring swim. As the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds, the reader is mesmerized by change and oblivion, survival and memories.
"Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doingThe Rings of Saturn glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit." -- Roberta Silman - The New York Times Book Review
"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
"He is an addiction, and, once button-holed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away." -- Anthony Lane - The New Yorker
"An extraordinary palimpsest of nature, human, and literary history." -- Merle Rubin - The Wall Street Journal
"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
"Think of W.G. Sebald as memory's Einstein." -- Richard Eder - Los Angeles 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
"Sublime." -- Cynthia Ozick
"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
"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
"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
"He is an addiction, and, once button-holed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away." -- Anthony Lane - The New Yorker
"An extraordinary palimpsest of nature, human, and literary history." -- Merle Rubin - The Wall Street Journal
"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
"Think of W.G. Sebald as memory's Einstein." -- Richard Eder - Los Angeles 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
"Sublime." -- Cynthia Ozick
"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
"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
W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo. Michael Hulse is an English translator, critic, and poet. Hulse has translated more than sixty books from the German.
| SKU | CIN0811226158VG |
| ISBN 13 | 9780811226158 |
| ISBN 10 | 0811226158 |
| Title | The Rings of Saturn |
| Author | W G Sebald |
| Condition | Very Good |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Year published | 2016-12-23 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us |
