The Emigrants: 853 (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Sebald, W. G.; Hulse, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081122614X ISBN 13: 9780811226141

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

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:

Sublime.--Cynthia Ozick

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. The very greates write of what cannot be written. I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W.G. Sebald.

Sebald is a rare and elusive species, but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.--Anthony Lane

Tragic, stunningly beautiful, strange and haunting. The secret of Sebald's appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak.

The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald's books is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote - as was often remarked - like a ghost. He was one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt exhumed from the nineteenth.--Geoff Dyer

One of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers.--James Wood

Sebald is a rare and elusive species... But still he is an easy read, just as Kafka is... He is an addiction, and, once button-holed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.--Anthony Lane

In Sebald's writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death... beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny - an art that was, in the end, Sebald's strange and inscrutable gift.

A masterpiece.--Richard Eder

A writer of almost unclassifiable originality, but whose voice we recognize as indispensable and central to our time.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 081122614X
• ISBN 13: 9780811226141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240