The Emigrants - Hardcover

Sebald, Winfried Georg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811213382 ISBN 13: 9780811213387

Publisher: New Directions, 1996

Synopsis

Journeying through England, Austria, and America to salvage memories of the Holocaust, four narratives capture the lives of four people in exile--a painter, an elderly White Russian, Sebald's schoolteacher, and his own eccentric Great Uncle Ambrose--in a family portrait of a family destroyed.

About this title

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)

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811213382
• ISBN 13: 9780811213387
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 237