"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn--with its curious archive of photographs--chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."

☀作者簡介

[德]溫弗裏德·塞巴爾德

1944年生於德國，1970年起任教於英國東英吉利大學，2001年因車禍去世。作品風格獨特，被公認為諾貝爾文學奬得主級彆的作傢。代錶作有《奧斯特利茨》《移民》《土星之環》《眩暈》等。

☀譯者簡介

閔誌榮，南京大學德語語言文學專業碩士和哥廷根大學跨文化日耳曼學專業碩士，現任江蘇理工學院外 國語學院德語係係主任，曾譯有《文化學研究導論》《至古典主義德國文學中的中國》《德意誌星球》 等書。