Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Rings of Saturn > Status Update

Farrar is the third name who is introduced and announced dead in the same breath. Sebald effortlessly and seemingly random goes from one subject to the next. Along the way, I figured it’s like these staan of fragments, like the debris of the Rings of Saturn are orbiting around a (yet) unarticulated point. So far, a lot of decline and loss…

[Frederick] devoted himself to breeding rare roses and violets. I need hardly add that the iris was also one of his favourites.

.. on account of course of his sisters names are Violet, Iris and Rose. I love how Sebald takes for granted that we paid attention on the previous page…

The great pain of separation, Frederick recalled, was with me for a long time, especially before going to sleep or when I was tidying my things; but one evening at the start of my second year, when we were told to assemble on the west forecourt, this pain was transformed within me into a kind of perverse pride. (p. 46)

The stuffed polar bear in the entrance hall stands over three yards tall. With its yellowish and moth-eaten fur, it resembles a ghost bowed by sorrows.

1. In hospital – Obituary – Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull – Anatomy lecture – Levitation – Quincunx – Fabled creatures – Urn burial

The writing is more than fine, switching effortlessly from subject to subject however, which asks a strong concentration that cannot be expected to simply and easily be coughed up. An interruption seems disastrous...

To see one’s name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Under the wonderful influence of the painkillers coursing through me, I felt, in my iron-framed bed, like a balloonist floating weightless amidst mountainous clouds towering in every side. At times the billowing masses would past and I gazed out at the indigo vastness and down into the depths where I suppose the earth to be, a black and impenetrable maze.