The Rings of Saturn

W. G. Sebald

Nov 2016 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund

A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund 

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 which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."

Ratings and reviews

Everything by Sebald is genius. Not so Random House, who failed to copy-edit the digital book. Every few pages a "t" has been rendered as "r", so that "but" becomes "bur" and "buffeted" becomes "buffered". It looks like they simply scanned the pages, and ran a quick spell-check, doing a disservice to a truly great book.

Excellent. Really comes together at the end to emphasize the point he was making all along. Life is a long line of connected tragedies and coincidences propagating throughout the generations. And it largely amounts to nothing but the memory of a shadow.

About the author

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.