IdleRich

IdleRich
Just finished rings of Saturn, wg sebald. Pretty good. Some bits very good, like the Joseph Conrad section, weird how that one just broke off far earlier than I thought it should have done, but I suppose that's his thing.
Didn't we do that as the inaugural "dissensus book club" read many years ago? Or maybe it was Austerlitz. Either way I much preferred Rings of Saturn out of those two books... it's a distant memory but I remember bits of it really kinda touching me. How does it end? I seem to recall the last passage being very stark and powerful but I could be thinking of something else.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The first was Austerlitz. I enjoyed both very much. I think TRoS just ends with him in some faded Victorian hotel in a bleak Suffolk coastal town on the off season, feeling a bit miserable (for a change). At least that's how I remember it. I don't think anything 'happens' as such.

Anyone got any idea why it's titled the way it is?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Yeah there's this whole strain of black-supremacist fringe thought that's adopted wholesale the 'race realist' position from white supremacists and just reversed the value judgement.

There's also a fringe theory that us aspies are all part-Neanderthal (neurotypical prosocial traits enabled hom sap to band together and basically locker-slam our primate nerd forebears into extinction), which overlaps somewhat with the theory that "white devils" are para-human, lacking in empathy, etc.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Re TRoS - it ends with this long tale about silkworm farming and how it evolved, coming over to Europe from china, having been kept secret, and the Germans think about how it can be made into an industry, but it doesn't work, cos it's harder than people think. after he's talked about that for a while, i tihkn he just gets picked up by his wife or something. it's not a great ending tbh.
i don't recall an explicit explanation of why it's called what it's called, but there's a general feel of reflection about it all and he's obviously an old man so maybe he's in his 2nd saturn's return or something, although i think he actually died before he was 60 so that might not be quite right. yeah, odd. i'm sure some wag online has worked it out...

oh yeah wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rings_of_Saturn#Title
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'd thought Sebald killed himself but Wikipedia tells me died in a car crash.

Regarding the title, I guess Saturn/Kronos is also the prototypical Old Father Time.

There's also a fringe theory that us aspies are all part-Neanderthal (neurotypical prosocial traits enabled hom sap to band together and basically locker-slam our primate nerd forebears into extinction), which overlaps somewhat with the theory that "white devils" are para-human, lacking in empathy, etc.

Evolved, or were genetically engineered by Yakub?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sebald died in a car crash yeah. Apparently it scuppered his chances of a Nobel Prize for Literature cos you have to be alive to get that. Least of his worries though I suppose (or maybe best say he has none at all).
I took Rings of Saturn to mean something similar to the title Robinson in Space - which I understand to mean something about travelling round outside of one's familiar locale. Maybe. I dunno. It just sort of felt that way to me on some level but I could be totally wrong about both titles. And the notion that they are similar.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I must be thinking of something else with respect to the ending then. I often read several things at the same time and thus I can associate and mix them in my head even though really they have nothing more in common than that I happened to pick them off the shelf in the same week.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I think it would have been better if he got into a few more scrapes, met some people, did some blow, went to a rave etc. The bit near the beginning where he's in Lowestoft is really good, cos he's so dismissive of it and caustic, so its very amusing. He spends ages talking about all these old halls that he visits, which is also quite interesting, but maybe gets a bit much. I think his style of writing is excellent, very meandering and different voices in the same sentence, so it's like someone sat in front of you telling a story. It's just some of the subject matter is a bit boring for me. The air of melancholy is pretty palpable, I've just been to a Ruskin exhibition and he strikes me as a similar outlook type person, just a depressive perspective on things cos of his early life experiences.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I'm trying.

It has got quite a druggy feel in places which is really good. There's a bit where he comes to a field and it's really radiantly coloured so he's spellbound and is trundling around it and then he realises he's been walking for hours and comes back to the exact same spot and figures out he's totally lost and starts panicking. That bit is good.

There's a few places where he gets lost come to think about it, he goes into a maze in one of the grand houses and gets stuck a bit there. I like all the history of the halls, how they were established by the new low born entrepreneurial class and they bought parcels of land then cleared them so they had a good vista. The tech overlords of the day I suppose. And then had massive hunting parties to earn blue blood patronage.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I liked the bit when he went to a stately home that used to be very glamorous and is now falling apart, whereas the grounds - the trees outside - have become more and more lush and beautiful.

The main thing I really remember from Rings of Saturn now is the idea of combustion/destruction being integral to existence. He's talking about furnaces and so on, I suppose there's the spectre of Auschwitz hovering silently over it all.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Slow progress on that, as I was on the last of my holidays from Friday to Monday - I managed to 'do' the Sumerians, Bablyonians and Ancient Egyptians.

Of interest to me was this:

"For the ancient Egyptian, the name was the thing; the real object we separate from its designation was identical with it... The Egyptians lived in symbolism as fishes do in water, taking it for granted, and we have to break through the assumptions of a profoundly unsymbolic culture to understand them... the ancient Egyptians show a remarkably uniform tendency to seek through religion a way of penetrating the variety of the flow of ordinary experiences so as to reach a changeless world most easily understood through the life of the dead lived there. Perhaps the pulse of the Nile is to be detected here, too; each year it swept away and made new, but its cycle was ever recurring, changeless, the embodiment of a cosmic rhythm."
 
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