The Rings of Saturn; W.G. Sebald
Yet another of Sebald's nameless, over-educated and pharmacologically unstable editors wanders the dying English coast. He talks about his travels and everything else.
How kind I feel towards The Rings of Saturn depends solely on my mood. Under the influence of warm milk and sleepy classical music, The Rings of Saturn reads like an encyclopedia -- no! A funhouse! A demented and melancholy funhouse! -- of anecdotes about slow decay and rot. After listening to 50 rap about pleasuring women with his magic stick, The Rings of Saturn seems more like the Family Guy for the bleary-eyed English major.
The issue isn't the prose; Sebald's writing is as beautiful, as carefully restrained, and as meticulously crafted here as it was in Austerlitz. Every anecdote in The Rings of Saturn would be perfectly at home in any great, honored collection of literature. But that's partly the problem. Austerlitz had a basic framework -- as flimsy as it could be at times. It had a main plot, and there were digressions, but Sebald always weaved his meandering tales back into the heart of Austerlitz's narrative. Here, it just seems to be one string of anecdotes after the other. The stories are, at best, connected by a single sentence, if even that. So going chapter by chapter is about as rewarding as, well, reading a dictionary. Yes, all of the individual pieces are gorgeous, but it's difficult to see what they contribute as a whole.
Finishing the book, all you feel is the vague sense of an author obsessed with decay, and with a very, very articulate pen.
There were eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weaks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendor. [pg 77]
The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn -- an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness. [pg 78- 79]
Everything round about rots, decays and sinks into the ground. There are only two seasons: the white winter and the green winter. For nine months the ice cold air sweeps down from the Artic sea. The thermometer plunges to unbelievable depths and one is surrounded by a limitless darkness. During the green winter it rains week in week out. The mud creeps over the threshold, rigor mortis is temporarily lifted and a few signs of life, in the form of an all-pervasive marasmus, begin to manifest themselves. In the white winter everything is dead, during the green winter everything is dying. [pg. 105]
The mass suicide of the Taipingis is without historical parallel. When their enemies broke through the gates on the morning of the 19th of July, they found not a soul alive. But the city was filled with the humming of flies. The King of the Celestial Realm of Eternal Peace, according to a despatch sent to Peking, lay face-down in a gutter, his bloated body held together only by the silken robes of imperial yellow, adorned with the image of the dragon, which, with blasphemous presumption, he had always worn. [pg 141]
In August 1861, after months of irresolution, Emperor Hsien-feng lay in his Jehol exile approaching the end of his short and dissipated life. The waters had already risen from his abdomen to his heart, and the cells of his gradually dissolving flesh floated like fish in the sea in the salt fluid that leaked from his bloodstream into every available space in the body tissue. Through his flickering consciousness, Hsien-feng followed the invasion by foreign powers of the provinces of his empire by perfect proxy, as his own limbs died off and his organs flooded with toxins. [pg 146]
The window panes in the locked up rooms misted over with cobwebs, dry rot advanced, vermin bore spores of mould to every nook and cranny, and monstrous brownish-purple and black fungal growths appeared on the walls and ceilings, often the size of an ox-head. The floorboards began to give, the beams of the ceilings sagged, and the panelling and staircases, long since rotten within, crumbled to sulphurous yellow dust, at times overnight. [pg 217-218]
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Yet another of Sebald's nameless, over-educated and pharmacologically unstable editors wanders the dying English coast. He talks about his travels and everything else.
How kind I feel towards The Rings of Saturn depends solely on my mood. Under the influence of warm milk and sleepy classical music, The Rings of Saturn reads like an encyclopedia -- no! A funhouse! A demented and melancholy funhouse! -- of anecdotes about slow decay and rot. After listening to 50 rap about pleasuring women with his magic stick, The Rings of Saturn seems more like the Family Guy for the bleary-eyed English major.
The issue isn't the prose; Sebald's writing is as beautiful, as carefully restrained, and as meticulously crafted here as it was in Austerlitz. Every anecdote in The Rings of Saturn would be perfectly at home in any great, honored collection of literature. But that's partly the problem. Austerlitz had a basic framework -- as flimsy as it could be at times. It had a main plot, and there were digressions, but Sebald always weaved his meandering tales back into the heart of Austerlitz's narrative. Here, it just seems to be one string of anecdotes after the other. The stories are, at best, connected by a single sentence, if even that. So going chapter by chapter is about as rewarding as, well, reading a dictionary. Yes, all of the individual pieces are gorgeous, but it's difficult to see what they contribute as a whole.
Finishing the book, all you feel is the vague sense of an author obsessed with decay, and with a very, very articulate pen.
There were eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weaks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendor. [pg 77]
The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn -- an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness. [pg 78- 79]
Everything round about rots, decays and sinks into the ground. There are only two seasons: the white winter and the green winter. For nine months the ice cold air sweeps down from the Artic sea. The thermometer plunges to unbelievable depths and one is surrounded by a limitless darkness. During the green winter it rains week in week out. The mud creeps over the threshold, rigor mortis is temporarily lifted and a few signs of life, in the form of an all-pervasive marasmus, begin to manifest themselves. In the white winter everything is dead, during the green winter everything is dying. [pg. 105]
The mass suicide of the Taipingis is without historical parallel. When their enemies broke through the gates on the morning of the 19th of July, they found not a soul alive. But the city was filled with the humming of flies. The King of the Celestial Realm of Eternal Peace, according to a despatch sent to Peking, lay face-down in a gutter, his bloated body held together only by the silken robes of imperial yellow, adorned with the image of the dragon, which, with blasphemous presumption, he had always worn. [pg 141]
In August 1861, after months of irresolution, Emperor Hsien-feng lay in his Jehol exile approaching the end of his short and dissipated life. The waters had already risen from his abdomen to his heart, and the cells of his gradually dissolving flesh floated like fish in the sea in the salt fluid that leaked from his bloodstream into every available space in the body tissue. Through his flickering consciousness, Hsien-feng followed the invasion by foreign powers of the provinces of his empire by perfect proxy, as his own limbs died off and his organs flooded with toxins. [pg 146]
The window panes in the locked up rooms misted over with cobwebs, dry rot advanced, vermin bore spores of mould to every nook and cranny, and monstrous brownish-purple and black fungal growths appeared on the walls and ceilings, often the size of an ox-head. The floorboards began to give, the beams of the ceilings sagged, and the panelling and staircases, long since rotten within, crumbled to sulphurous yellow dust, at times overnight. [pg 217-218]