Björn recenserade Die Ringe des Saturn av W.G. Sebald
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5 stjärnor
Holy shit, what a book. I'd held off on Sebald because something told me he deserves to be read in German and ... holy shit. The way he builds sentences, nesting clauses and gerunds like a Rube Goldberg device, separating trennbare verbs by half a page, making every single sentence like a high-precision Rube Goldberg device where you never know where you'll land until you finally reach a full stop and get to to gaze back at that perfect creation.
That's the first thing that strikes me. But then the text itself, starting as a simple almost Pythonesque travelogue of walking around Suffolk, building from stumbled-upon remnants of initially fairly recent history and digging both outwards and inwards - into European wars and colonialism, into art and architecture, into various people he stumbles upon on his walks (alive and long dead) and into himself, into this weird, fragile hybrid of …
Holy shit, what a book. I'd held off on Sebald because something told me he deserves to be read in German and ... holy shit. The way he builds sentences, nesting clauses and gerunds like a Rube Goldberg device, separating trennbare verbs by half a page, making every single sentence like a high-precision Rube Goldberg device where you never know where you'll land until you finally reach a full stop and get to to gaze back at that perfect creation.
That's the first thing that strikes me. But then the text itself, starting as a simple almost Pythonesque travelogue of walking around Suffolk, building from stumbled-upon remnants of initially fairly recent history and digging both outwards and inwards - into European wars and colonialism, into art and architecture, into various people he stumbles upon on his walks (alive and long dead) and into himself, into this weird, fragile hybrid of palimpsests that 50 years of peace has brought to Western Europe. And all of it through those meandering, jenga-like sentences that can cover everything within one breath.