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| The Emigrants | 
| Authors: W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 41131
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 238
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0811213668
Dewey Decimal Number: 833.914
EAN: 9780811213660
ASIN: 0811213668
Publication Date: September 1997
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Amazon.com Review
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 neighbor 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
Product Description
Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US and sold out immediately in its first hardcover edition, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austria, and America. The narrator literally follows their footsteps, studding each story with photographs and creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album. But gradually, Sebald's prose, which combines documentary description with almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts a new magic, and the four stories merge into one. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 The trail of the butterfly man: homage to Vladimir Dimitrovich April 17, 2008
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Having my appetite for Sebald wetted by Austerlitz, I picked up the Emigrants with high expectations, and they were surpassed: on top of the expected modern masterpiece I got a recognition of one the greatest writers on emigration that Europe produced in the 20th century. Nabokov shows up in all four pieces in small roles, a bit like Hitchcock did in his films. His appearances are as dispersed, geographically, as the stories told here.
The Emigrants are four men whose life stories Sebald explores in his meandering multiple media way. All of them are people that played some kind of part in Sebald's life, if only tangentially, like his temporary landlord in England, who had come from Lithuania to England, married a rich Swiss woman, got estranged and poor and became an ornamental hermit, in his own words. One man is his granduncle who emigrated to the US and became an appendix of a rich Jewish banking family. One is a former teacher who had been banned from teaching during the Third Reich, being a 'quarter Jew', but was not banned from soldiering for six years; when the war was over he went back to his old profession,taught Sebald for a while, but could not stand this life for long and went abroad. One is a painter, an aquaintance of Sebald's from his student time in Manchester, who escaped from the holocaust trap to England just in time, but whose parent got left behind to perish. The men share a deep melancholia or depression, and all find an end either by their own hand or by diseases aquired by lifestyle choice. The state of being an exile is not explored analytically, but phenomenologically. The tales of 4 men dive deeply into European history and civilization.
One of the surprising aspects of this great writer, who died much too young at 57 in 2001, is that he seems barely noticed in his home land. If you look at the German Amazon site, you see just 3 reviews of this book. When I tried to add a fourth, the system was down.
That's how come this review shows up in the American version of Amazon. It is just more lively here.
Literature like none else in desolation and despair February 29, 2008
There are writers whose work seems almost impossible to describe, writers who create a form of writing so wholly their own that it bears an unmistakable and unique, even uncanny signature. Sebald is such a writer. His writing is a mixture of memory and meditation, but also of tremendously detailed and specific description of what is seen. He can simply report upon a certain reality and it will take on a haunting quality. His sense of the visual and of the density of the world in its richness of things is incredible. The photos and illustrations which punctuate the text and offer a kind of commentary and subject for deeper meditation are also part of what he is constructing. The isolated narrator who tells the four stories of the 'characters-victims' of each chapter too seems to flow in mind and heart into the very being of the characters and some way become inseparable for them. And this as if to suggest that the creation is not simply of character and life story but of a whole atmosphere, a whole mood of mind - one which is at once desolate and tremendously filled with grief and sadness. It is paradoxical how this is at once great literature which so ordinarily uplifts and yet gives an overall feeling which is so disquieting and troubling. The horrors of the Nazi regime are not detailed directly here. Instead the consequences of those actions in what they have done to the lives of the 'isolatos' portrayed here gives a disheartening picture of the ultimate desolation of humanity unkind.
The Emigrants September 9, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Emigrants is a novel in the form of four biographical episodes. The narrator, according to the details of his own life story, is Sebald himself. Three of the four subjects are men whom he supposedly meets at various points in his life; the fourth is he great uncle. The biographies have an air of authenticity due in no small part to the photographs which illustrate the text.
The common theme linking these four men is that they have emigrated from their German-speaking homeland. Two of them are Jewish and left as a direct result of Nazi anti-Semitism. The third (the first in sequence) is presumably Jewish as well and left for the same reasons, but I don't believe it is spelled out in the text. The fourth, the great-uncle, is also Jewish but left Germany for economic reasons.
In each case there is a pervasive air of nostalgia in the subject's recollection of his past. It is the memory of times past, rather than the Jewishness or German-ness of the characters, that is the pervasive theme of the novel. "Memory," says the great-uncle in his journal, "often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time, but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds."
I've read three novels by Sebald (the others being Austerlitz and Rings of Saturn), and they are very similar in style, concept and mood. The style is very readable despite long paragraphs and the absence of quotation marks. The concept in each case is an exploration of the past set in an autobiographical context and illustrated with black and white photographs. The mood is universal melancholy. There is a pervasive sense of loss, loneliness and decay that give Sebald's novels a haunting sense of the emptiness of modern life. This is ironic, since the past, for all its nostalgic charm, is largely characterized by war, economic deprivation, and anti-Semitism.
Despite its typically rambling nature, and the complete absence of any conventional plot, The Emigrants is compulsive reading. Sebald takes us effortlessly from an English garden of the 1980's, to a German schoolroom of the 1930's , to Istanbul in 1913, and to bustling Manchester in the 1920's - just to name a few locales. The wide range of characters, economically portrayed, includes fascinating and realistic men and women from various time periods and nationalities.
After reading The Emigrants, one is left with a nagging sense of disquiet bordering on remorse, as though Sebald's past were our own and the truths that will make sense of it all are hidden just out of sight in the mists of time.
Shadows of the past September 8, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Memories have a strange way of clinging to people, appearing haphazardly and intermittently. Other times they may roll over an individual with such insistence it changes the course of their life. Often the mind modifies recollections over time, suggesting altered fragments of past realities when they return. Sebald is a master of searching out lost or hidden memories. In a format that goes beyond the traditional genres, he merges memoir, biography, travelogue and fiction. In an often elegiac, yet precise language with great attention to detail, he takes the reader on a winding road of discovery. He creates patterns and builds connections out of incidents and places that initially appear disjointed. In The Emigrants he applies his unique writing style and descriptive technique to the fullest.
The book consists of four independent narratives portraying four very different individuals within their social and historical context. Yet, each of them is profoundly connected to a past that each cannot escape. The oblique references to the disturbing events of the twentieth century - the two World Wars, the Holocaust - linger like a shadow behind the characters, having deeply scarred their existence. The narrator, who in part, or entirely, could be Sebald himself, is an inquisitive researcher into his subjects' lives. In his quest to comprehend each of them, he imagines himself in their shoes, traveling through many villages, towns and countries, tracing their wanderings, probing in depth their temporary existence away from their homeland and the reasons for giving up on their lives: the doctor, the teacher, the great uncle, and the painter. Sebald is a meticulous observer of locales in nature. His own ruminations when walking along a familiar village path or through the street maze of a city add a rare quality of authenticity to the accounts. The significance of his usually gloomy black and white photos, apparently incidental, yet deliberately placed, of buildings, landscapes, objects or people, while not identified, emerges from the narrative context and strengthens it.
With each portrait Sebald builds a more complex character study. He expands his understanding of the subject beyond his personal recollections by interviewing intermediaries, such as family and friends and sifting through their documents and photos. In an overall sense, the protagonists are characters of fiction. However, they are drawn from and shaped to a greater or lesser extend by Sebald's memory of people he knew. For example, his elementary school teacher was the basis for Paul who, as part Jewish, was prevented from teaching during the thirties and left the country only to return after the war and to end up in the village of Sebald's childhood. The most direct connection between the narrator and his subject is established in the portrait of Max Ferber, who also resembles Sebald contemporary, the painter Frank Auerbach. In conversations and joint walks through Manchester, where Sebald lived for a time, the reader can sense that his narrator might well reflects many of the author's thoughts and preoccupations at the time.
All four individuals were ordinary people formed by extraordinary circumstances. A feeling of nostalgia for a simpler and happier time permeates the stories as Sebald's narrator reminisces over diaries and photos from his subjects' collections. The reader, almost despite themselves, are drawn into these personal portraits and also the reflections on time, loss and memory as a result of the turmoil of the twentieth century. [Friederike Knabe]
Memorable January 10, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Sebald writes so well (at least the way it is translated into English) and so effortlessly that the book glides easily from one story to the other and is rather easy to read. The Emigrants has an elegiac quality that constantly pulls you into lost realms. I really liked reading his book and discovering (through Google) his allusions to German department stores and cookies, as well as his asides about Nazis. Highly recommendable but it is a sad book.
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