The Rings of Saturn ....

For anyone who may have missed this and is interested, Robert Macfarlane is starting a shared read of The Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald  on Twitter this week.  

I have cut and pasted some of Robert's twitter thread here for your information...

'On Monday 9 July at 9am, a global Twitter reading group of WG Sebald's great & haunting book, The Rings of Saturn, begins - running until 2 August. Join us!'

Each day or two at 9am, I'll post questions or reflections about the book; its style, landscapes, strange form, found photographs, histories, ethics; about its many influences & legacies; about pilgrimage, atrocity, analogy, nature, moths, stars, exile & memory's patterns...

People can join these conversations, and/or begin their own, and/or join other conversations, using the hashtags. In this way a loose constellation of discussions should find its own shifting form over the course of the weeks of the group.

.there is, needless to say, no obligation to 'like' the book. It confronts & challenges readers with its indirections & obliquities, its greyscale, the darkness of the history encountered during this 'Englische Wallfahrt" (English Pilgrimage; the book's German subtitle)...

.I will be reading (& quoting from) the book in English, in Michael Hulse's translation from the original German, with which Sebald (1944-2001) was much involved. Others in the group will be reading in other languages. Translation is inevitably one of our subjects...

There is no obligation to have read the book in advance, or to 'keep up' with the group. It is a digressive, recursive work, and responses to it will often be of that nature also. My own questions will wander vaguely through the book's course over the weeks' course

 

I should probably make plain now that I am running this group because I find The Rings of Saturn deeply, unsettlingly powerful, and wish to examine that power as part of a community of readers. There is zero pecuniary gain for me, nor any hidden motive...

 

just a pleasure taken in thinking with and learning from others, and bringing new readers to a book that has been part of my life as a writer, teacher & walker for nearly twenty years. In 2006 I followed on foot the book's route, from Somerleyton Hall to Orford Ness...

 

.So - do join. There is no qualification or enrolment necessary. It will be a pleasure to walk these pages & places with you. “Perhaps there is something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer." 

 

I will definitely be joining this because, having read The Rings of Saturn several times, I feel sure I have a great deal more to discover about the book, and this feels like a wonderful and generous opportunity to learn more.

 

My copy is off the shelf and ready.