The Rings of Saturn

Thought I would start with this amazing book that I recently finished reading. The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald is one of the strangest and most sublime of books I have read in a long time. On surface it just appears to be a normal travel book with lots of biographical and historical anecdotes thrown in but what makes it apart from the run of the mill travel books is that the writer is not interested in the landscapes just for the sake of it, he is interested in the desolate, lonely landscapes only in so far as they provoke some thoughts and feelings in the writer's head and with Sebald those thoughts and feelings are invariably deeply and movingly melancholic and yet the book is surprisingly extremely uplifting overall (which I use as an approving term). I came out of the book with a sense of amazement and wonder at having seen some mysterious connection between everything which was completely invisible to the eyes earlier. In this book Sebald achieves that rare, difficult aim of every artist--using one's raw experiences and making something beautiful and meaningful out of it by putting those experiences in a unified structure using the power of one's imagination and creativity.

The search for meaning and unity becomes even more important given the subject matter of the book. The writer is taking a walking tour of the seashore English counties of Suffolk and Norfolk and muses variously on different subjects ranging from the horrors of Belgian colonialism, an anatomical painting by Rembrandt, palace intrigues in the nineteenth century China, the exiled life of various literary figures like Joseph Conrad and many other people and things. All these and more seem too disparate and random to make any sense as a whole but in Sebald's hands these things become mysteriously connected to become one unified whole. The theme perhaps that binds all these things is the idea of the transience of all things human and even non-human or what Thomas Browne, one of the nineteenth century personages described in the book, calls the "opium of time" and "iniquities of oblivion".

In writing the book Sebald does what every writer dreams of doing: he manages to move through space and time seamlessly and relates his story in what might be called in philosophical terms, in Eternal Present. And by giving such contemporaneous weight to the people and events, which are marginalised by the cruel indifference of the relentless march of time, he also undoes to a large extent the iniquities of oblivion.

I was wondering about the mysterious effects the book had on me and reached a conclusion that perhaps the book affected me so much because these days I am also feeling somewhat "exiled" (I am currently in Chicago far away from my "home" and feeling desperately alone) as the narrator and the various people that he describes in the book do. Or perhaps it has something to do with my Proustian obsession with the "remembrance of things past" or the "search of lost time".

There are many more thoughts and feeling (all sublime and nothing ridiculous!) that I can go on writing about but more for later posts.