The Emigrants - Softcover

Sebald, W G

4.17

10,154 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860463495 ISBN 13: 9781860463495

Publisher: Vintage, 1997

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The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be plain accounts of the lives of Jewish emigrants in Norfolk, Austria, America and Manchester. There are even a great many photographs amid the text, which give the impression that the reader is poring over a family album, trying to tease out the truth behind the fading images. However, as Sebald s prose gradually exerts a powerful hold on the reader, the stories merge into one overwhelming evocation of the experience of exile and loss of homeland. Throughout the book the figure of Nabokov is used to symbolise the modern emigrant. Just as survival forced Nabokov to turn his back on four different homelands in the course of his life, so the emigrants in Sebald s stories are destined to wander far and wide, forever displaced and destined never to reach an end to their restless search for home and identity.

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Review:

The Emigrants is a meditation on memory and loss. Sebald re-creates the lives of four exiles--five if you include his oblique self-portrait--through their own accounts, others' recollections and pictures and found objects. But he brings these men before our eyes only to make them fade away, "longing for extinction." Two were eventual suicides, another died in an asylum, the fourth still lived under a "poisonous canopy" more than 40 years after his parents' death in Nazi Germany.

Sebald's own longing is for communion. En route to Ithaca (the real upstate New York location but also the symbolic one), he comes to feel "like a travelling companion of my neighbour in the next lane." After the car speeds away--"the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window--I felt deserted and desolate for a time." Sebald's narrative is purposely moth-holed (butterfly-ridden, actually--there's a recurring Nabokov-with-a-net type), an escape from the prison-house of realism. According to the author, his Uncle Ambros's increasingly improbable tales were the result of "an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions." Luckily for us, Sebald seems to have inherited the same syndrome. --Kerry Fried

Review:

"Strange, beautiful and terribly moving" (A.S. Byatt)

"This deeply moving book shames most writers with its nerve and tact and wonder" (Michael Ondaatje)

"An unconsoling masterpiece...It is exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art" (Spectator)

"A spellbinding account of four Jewish exiles. Its restrained and meditative tone has stayed with me all year" (Nicholas Shakespeare)

"A sober delicate account of displacement, and a classic of its kind. Modest and remote, it resurrects older standards of behaviour, making most contemporary writing seem brash and immature. No book has pleased me more this year" (Anita Brookner, Spectator)

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