The Emigrants (New Directions Paperbook, 853) - Softcover

Sebald, W. G.; Hulse, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811213668 ISBN 13: 9780811213660

Publisher: New Directions, 1997

Synopsis

The four long narratives in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants at first appear to be the straightforward biographies of four people in exile: a painter, an elderly Russian, the author's schoolteacher as well as his eccentric great-uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories of the Holocaust, he collects documents, diaries, pictures. Each story is illustrated with enigmatic photographs, making The Emigrants seem at times almost like a family album - but of families destroyed. Sebald weaves together variant forms (travelog, biography, autobiography, and historical monograph), combining precise documentary with fictional motifs. As he puts the question to "realism, " the four stories merge gradually into one requiem, overwhelming and indelible.

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0811213668
• ISBN 13: 9780811213660
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238