Thalia Bookclub has a wonderful show devoted to the Rings of Saturn. Guests were Dinaw Mengestu, Rick Moody, Hari Kunzru, and Denis O'Hare. Rick Moody was especially fantastic and now I would like to read one of his books. One of the others remarked that to read Sebald is to try to "understand the world by assembling fragments together, like piecing together pieces in the puzzle."
But isn't that more like what it's like to live life? Moody wondered. Our lives really don't feel like those things we read about in an American novel "with a clear narrative arc and "through line." Meaning is gained through examining multiple threads, varying starts and stops and traveling over old ground--in rings."
I agree with this. And perhaps it is why I love digressive writing. Japanese traditional essays, and Japanese literature in general values digressions and derailments--as long as they are interesting. And Sebald is endlessly interesting. Addictive like Bernhard--but I think he is better. The greatest in my lifetime?
Moody made a fantastic map of the digressions--and how these are in fact circular rings of meaning.
It is interesting to try and view the miscellanea as a Cabinet of Curiosity. As a way to understand the world by assembling fragments together like piecing together pieces in the puzzle.
This from Biblioklept:
At the end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s narrator returns to Thomas Browne’s skull again–only this time resurrected, a living brain. He discusses at length Browne’s Musaem Clausum, an imaginary library that Browne invented containing texts, artifacts, and relics of every manner of wonder. Sebald’s narrator goes on for pages listing the contents of Musaem Clausum with fervor and passion–the reader realizes that the book, and the narrator, could go on and on, detailing these wonders and their connected histories under more intense scrutiny. Rings replicates both Browne’s Musaem Clausum and Dürer’s engraving, offering readers a tour through myriad marvels–and if the walk is melancholy and strange, it is also profound and beautiful, and very, very rewarding.
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