Rings of Saturn

A reviewer

At least one blurb on the back cover refers to Rings of Saturn as 'sublime,' and I think that Sebald gives a practical meaning to the concept here in the 21st century, and perhaps for the first time since the Romantics, who we can never really read as a 19th century reader could. Sebald, more than any one, I think, is the most beautiful and haunting writer of our age. Rings of Saturn, like his other works, is not hampered by the contrivances of plot and character, nor is it 'postmodern' in any way. Rather, it is a True fictional expression of the self and the world, replete with compelling ruminations that swirl together like the colors of a spinning top that meld together in the most beautiful and active pattern. I recommend it not only for the sake of its sublimity, its call to memory, its observations of decay, its senses of loss and hope, its distinctly artistic rendering of the disappearance of the natural world and the human being, but also because, quite practically, it is short. At 250 large-type pages, broken into 10, 25 page chapters that read like a voice from the page, telling a story, giving a lecture, delivering morality, it cannot be read like a typical novel where things can be glossed and nothing lost, but like a dream from which you awake and want to recall every detail, and the more you remember the more you realize there is to remember until your recollection is infinitely more detailed than the experience of the dream itself. Rings of Saturn, then, in this sense, is the best lesson in reading I have ever read. Furthermore, read in conjunction with Michel Foucault's Order of Things and you will likely end up like the narrator, on page one, supine in a hospital bed, looking at the corner of tree branch through the wire grate laminated in your window, remembering to breathe. Good luck with all of that.

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