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

[while reading the Southwold patrol ship’s log] Every thing I decipher one of these entries I am astounded that a tail that had long since vanished from the air or the water remains visible here on the paper. (p. 93)

The traces we leave and choose to leave behind, for better and for worse…

…it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link then, one see the smoke riding from there houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one are not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth… (p. 91)

…the bones of the exemplary dead man, the harbinger of a time when the years will be wiped from or eyes and there will be no more grief, or pain, of wiping and wailing. (p. 88)

3. Fishermen on the beach – The natural history of herring – George Wyndham Le Strange – A great herd of swine – The reduplication of man – Orbis Tertius

...a long and rambling talk about the writing of a novel that would fly in the face of palpable facts and become entangled in contradictions in such a way that few readers – very few readers – would be able to grasp the hidden, horrific, yet at the same time quite meaningless point of the narrative.

That certainly sums up neatly what I’ve been subjected to these first 75 pages, doesn’t it?

…the disturbing thing about mirrors, and also the act of copulation, is that they multiply the number of human beings. (p. 70)

Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils.

I went to the cliff and saw that [the sand martins] had dug their nesting holes into the topmost layer of clay, one beside the other. I was thus standing on perforated ground,… (p. 68)

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…

2. The diesel train – Morton Peto’s palace – Visiting Somerleyton – The cities of Germany in flames – The decline of Lowestoft – The former coastal resort – Frederick Farrar and the city of King James II