The Rings of Saturn

In this psychographic narrative, the author (unnamed, ostensibly Sebald) goes on a walking tour of Suffolk, observing various historical places, figures, and objects - everything from a documentary, to an old castle, to a skull, to a war monument, among others. Each thing provokes a long mediation on the often complex histories those things represent. History buffs would be in heaven - I, though I minored in history, have trouble keeping all the details straight. Picking up and putting down this book often (there are few natural breaks - understandably, as the narrator intellectualizes and winds together complex histories with his own worldview) and attempting to read on the elliptical or the tail-end of an insomnia episode, made it difficult to follow. Additionally, the narrator's voice is easily confused with that of the historical figures, as they are so delicately woven together. But sitting down to a dedicated spot of unspoilt reading time with this book yields great rewards: mesmerizing,melancholic (if not depressing) dissertation on what history itself is; like death itself, known but unknowable. “This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” And his conclusion about this perspective is not bright: “Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our vantage point?”

The book focuses on how humans have senselessly destroyed ourselves and the planet (“It seems to me that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder”), and that our memory only shows us that -in millions of permutations, across all continents - we will die, and contribute to the mountain of death...he does acknowledge that there is something beautiful about memory, but in a duplicitous way, because it also allows us to see and live with our mistakes, as individuals and as humans. “And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would be not the faintest trace of the past. How wretched this life is! - so full of false conceits, so futile, that there is little more than the shadows of the chimeras loosed by memory.”

A lovely (and short!) piece of writing - but I wouldn't recommend it unless you had some extended, dedicated reading time to really focus on it (unlike me... perhaps when I revisit it, in time, I will give it more stars).