July reading selection: Rings of Saturn

The Book Beat July reading group selection is W. B. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. Copies are in stock now and are discounted 15%. Our Zoom meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 27th at 7 pm. If you would like to attend, and are not receiving meeting links, please RSVP to us with your name, phone number and email and we will add you to our virtual reading group list. Reminders and login links are sent on the morning or day of the meeting. Please try and login 5-10 minutes early so we can begin on time.

The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson”, the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII.

Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: “On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”

“The book is exemplary of his strange and unique style: the hybridity of genres, the blurring of fact and fiction, the indistinct black and white photographs, and his meditation on the destructive nature of history, the human lives affected, and the restorative power of art.” —Public Domain Review

Stunning and strange. Like a dream you want to last forever.
—Roberta Silman, The New York Times

“Poignantly, Sebald reminded the reader that the dead, the murdered, have no life except in the imagination–though it remains helpless to do anything except reaffirm the reality of their loss.”
–Boston Review

“What makes a work fiction is not that the story is untrue—it may well be true, in part or in whole—but its use, or extension, of a variety of devices (including false or forged doc­uments) which produce what literary theorists call “the effect of the real.” Sebald’s fictions—and their accompanying visual illustration— carry the effect of the real to a plangent extreme.”
–Susan Sontag: On W. B. Sebald

“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

“A writer of almost unclassifiable originality, but whose voice we recognize as indispensable and central to our time.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“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

PATIENCE: (AFTER SEBALD)

A wonderful film tribute to the book Rings of Saturn and the author.

Gee says filming Patience and taking solitary coastal walks was nothing but pleasure. “I thought I could do something with the book,” he says. “There’s a strange comfort in it – I don’t find it in the least miserable. Being in the middle of Sebald’s melancholy isn’t depressing. In any case, I can’t believe Sebald’s walk was as miserable as he makes it sound. He was walking in the summer, staying at a pleasant hotel, visiting old friends, going to places that interested him.” —Guardian

Patience: (After Sebald) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En3VlxsAVgQ
About the Author

Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors.

A collection of five recordings from the BBC were made by friends and others who knew Sebald, including his translator Anetha Bell.

“Why You Should Read W. B. Sebald” –an article that appeared in the New Yorker.

Memento Mori: the skull of Sir Thomas Browne rests on top of a copy of his Religio Medici.

W. G. Sebald, the Trickster: A new biography tries to uncover the real lives behind Sebald’s fiction. Do they help us understand him?
-The New Yorker