Jewish Life Under Hilter

Considering that I read W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants in translation from the German, I am amazed at the beauty and fluidity of his language, particularly in regards to his description of physical environments - I'm not sure that I have ever encountered a writer who can evoke a specific place anywhere near as well as Sebald can. This book focuses on memory, particularly memories surrounding the forced displacement of European Jews by the Nazis. Sebald is much less interested in the recounting of events than he is in the understanding of motives and passions, and the first chapter, focusing on Dr. Henry Selwyn, is exceptional - Sebald handles melancholy, history, and decay with a lightness of touch that is truly the hallmark of a talented artist. ( )

This book is, in a minor key, what Sebald's Austerlitz is in a major key. It is a beautiful, moving book -- Cynthia Ozick describes it as "sublime," and I do not disagree. I would give Austerlitz ten stars; this one, then, is well worth the five I assign to it. ( )

I don’t know how to classify this book - it’s a mix between memoirs and fiction, or so it seems to me. The book says it’s literature, but it certainly reads like at least some of the story might be true, or perhaps Sebald just crafted memoirs around various old pictures.

In any case, this is a book about people who have emigrated from Germany, and the aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust on their lives. Even if it is fiction, the story is deeply moving as these people try to understand and content themselves with their lives now. There are several common themes throughout the story that link each of these characters together, all of which would spoil the story, except perhaps the very frequent intrusion of images of Nabokov throughout the book.

I liked it; I found the beginning a bit slow, but as it went on I could see the connections and found the book very engaging and touching. I loved the inclusion of old photographs; even if they were not genuinely connected to the characters in the book, it adds an element of reality and immersion. I think that Sebald does his hardest to draw his reader in and make him feel for these people, and he succeeded with me.

http://chikune.com/blog/?p=36 ( )

I discovered Sebald when a friend recommended Austerlitz, so, having started at the end, I'm inevitably going backwards. Die Ausgewanderten is the second of his books I've read.

Superficially at least, this is a much simpler book than Austerlitz -- four extended stories, apparently self-contained, each presenting a portrait of an exile. I'll try not to repeat what antimuzak has already said in a very detailed review.

What struck me was, first of all, to find many of the same characteristic Sebald features as in Austerlitz: photographs in the text; spare layout without quotation marks and with only very occasional paragraph breaks; a fascination with big buildings (hotels here; libraries, stations and forts in Austerlitz); obfuscation of the boundary between fact and fiction (Sebald-like narrator); evidence-based narrative -- we only hear what the narrator has experienced directly, or reports a third person as telling him.

The narratives are certainly simpler in structure than that of Austerlitz: we don't get into multiply-nested levels of narrators. Everything is either told by or to the narrator. However, the book is clearly not as simple as meets the eye. Trivially, the stories are all about the nature of exile and about memory, individual and collective. as you read, there are little facts that establish connections between the stories, places and minor characters that suddenly pop up, but at the same time there are destabilising elements that warn us not to make assumptions about what we are not told - is the narrator who grew up in the Bavarian town of S. and went to school taught by Paul Bereyter the same as the narrator who grew up in W. and is the great-nephew of Ambros Adelwarth?

It's tempting to speculate about the significance of the butterfly collector who appears in all the stories. The same one? Again, we don't know. We want to make patterns and say that he is, but Sebald doesn't give any clues. Is he a metaphor for the author, collecting the fragile fragments of colour in his Botanisiertrommel then letting them out for the reader? Or memory? Or the reader? Or just a butterfly collector? ( )