num_pages: 296
description: Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit."―Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII. Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole "On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation."  
language: English
title: The Rings of Saturn
titlecomplete: The Rings of Saturn
characters: Joseph Conrad
genres: Fiction, German Literature, Literature, Essays, Classics, Novels, Travel, Germany, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 14299
places: East Anglia, England
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
category: Essai, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize
category: Michael Hulse, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Dublin Literary Award
publisher: New Directions