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When I told an acquaintance that I was considering having W.G. Sebalds’s The Rings of Saturn as this month’s Book Club choice he said that it might inspire him to find his copy, vacuum it down and read it ‘at last’. I didn’t confess that my own copy had been gloomily waiting on a shelf in our bathroom since I first bought it in 2001 after hearing of the author’s death in a local car accident.
Prior to his death W.G. Sebald had been Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia and the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He was born in Bavaria in 1944, studied literature in Germany, Switzerland and Manchester where he became assistant lecturer in 1966 and settled in England permanently in 1970 when he moved to UEA.
Most descriptions of Sebald’s writing concentrate on the theme of memory and his attempt to reconcile himself with the trauma of the Second World War, its effect on the German psyche and his use of a mixture of ‘fact, recollection and fiction’. His books are interspersed with black and white photographs which ‘are set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly.’ Several of the narrative linked images in The Rings of Saturn are of Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th century physician, philosopher, botanist who had a deep interest in the natural world. He is the subject of the controversial and complex £2000,000 sculpture on Hay Hill in Norwich.
Andrew Motion has described The Rings of Saturn, in a review mentioned further on, as ‘a descriptive ramble along the edge of East Anglia… interspersed with more or less freestanding reflections on characters and ideas’ and which the reviewer believes ‘has its roots in late 19th-and early 20th-century travelogues…’
All this makes Sebald’s book sound quite difficult and a bit obscure and is probably why his book has stayed unread on at least two sets of book shelves and possibly many more.
I was however inspired to suggest the book as a Book Club choice by seeing Waterlog an exhibition, partly invoked by The Rings of Saturn, which was held in Norwich during the summer of 2007 and which drew ‘ upon the profound sense of place of the landscape of East Anglia…composed of a series of actual and imaginary journeys.’ About the same time I read a review by Andrew Motion of Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places a recently published description of the author’s tour of Britain's remotest parts. In the review, Motion comments that Mafarlane’s method ‘owes an obvious debt’ to The Rings of Saturn.
I’ve been reading The Wild Places and am dipping into Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (no direct connection to the exhibition) which describes his experiences of 'wild swimming' through Britain's rivers and lakes while commenting on the degradation of Britian’s waterways. So, as a coping mechanism, The Rings of Saturn, which I admit is not an easy read, will be going into the present mix of my ‘topographical’ reading. Might take a while though as it’s staying in the bathroom - hopefully not to get waterlogged.
Jeff
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