I stroked its snout and face, and chucked it in the hollow behind one ear, till at length it sighed like one enduring endless suffering.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald | Goodreads

Contributors include his English translator Anthea Bell, the poet George Szirtes, and the academic and novelist Christopher Bigsby, a colleague of Sebald’s at the University of East Anglia. In The Emigrantsmemory has been compromised, destroyed in a sense, by being turned into a condition of unappeasable remorse; there is no right way either to turn away from or to acknowledge the horror of what has gone before. p. 2: ”Sebald's premature death in December, 2001, shocked the literary world in Germany as well as in his home, Britain, and in the U. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed a quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Sebald’s fascination extends beyond the individual to broader human activity; he explores the history of herring fishing in northern Europe and explains how submerged land off Dunwich was once one of the most important ports in Europe.

Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust

Like so many German men of his generation, Sebald’s father refused to speak about his war experiences, and this reticence, with that of post-war Germany as a whole, is what impels Sebald’s narratives of shame and historical occlusion. In the film, we see a silk-worker receiving eggs dispatched by the Central Reich Institute of Sericulture in Celle, and depositing them in sterile trays. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphis after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as if there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. Ich sehe die von den Deutschen angerichtete Katastrophe, grauenvoll wie sie war, durchaus nicht als Unikum an – sie hat sich mit einer gewissen Folgerichtigkeit herausentwickelt aus der europäischen Geschichte und sich dann, aus diesem Grunde auch, hineingefressen in die europäische Geschichte.

Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. What's more, Hamburger's identity becomes fused with that of Friedrich Hölderlin, and the merging is emphasized by Sebald's (typical) omission of quotation marks for quotations, further eroding the separation of speakers in Sebald's account of the narrator's recollection of Hamburger's recollection. So too is The Rings of Saturn,a book most simply described as an account of a walking tour the author took some years ago in the English county of East Anglia, at the end of which–though this is explained at the beginning of the book–he suffered a nervous collapse.