The Emigrants (original 1992; edition 2002)

A couple of years ago, I read and reviewed another of Sebald’s novels, “Austerlitz.” “The Emigrants” – really more a series of four interlinked short stories – has many of the same themes and seems to deal with them in the same way. While I much preferred “Austerlitz,” I liked the stories here as well. Short stories, especially those collections where there is an important connecting thread between all the stories as there is here, sometimes give me difficulty because the whole reading experience doesn’t come across as unified as I would have liked. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I started reading this a few months ago right before I came down with some truly horrible form of stomach bug which put me out of commission for a few days. Not surprisingly, that might have also affected the reading experience.

I won’t say anything about the stories themselves. Summaries are readily available. But I would like to reiterate how much I love what Sebald did with his fiction. Characters of displacement and marginalization are always his core concerns; blurring the lines between documentarian journalism and fiction, his preferred method of writing. In this sense, he’s vaguely reminiscent of writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, but I think the broad philosophical scope and history that he’s writing about make his work much more important. His writing is superior to both, too.

Just as in “Austerlitz,” this book is full of historical photographs claiming to be of the characters, which manages to both keep a critical distance and build empathy in the reader toward the people we’re reading about. The tension that Sebald keeps bringing up between history and fiction continually and intelligently brings attention to both, and the complex relationship the two share.

I have “Rings of Saturn,” and am still very much interested in reading it even though I found it a less compelling reading experience than “Austerlitz,” which I still think is perhaps one of the best novels I’ve read in the past few years. For readers who are new to Sebald, I would suggest “Austerlitz” to those who prefer the form of the novel, and “The Emigrants” to those who prefer short stories. I can see both being a wonderful point of departure for appreciating what Sebald has to say. ( )

I'll have to do more research before Thursday, or I'll only complain about the most boring narrator(s)? ever. It's a fairly short book book about people monologuing to each other and/or to the reader endlessly.

Wow, just glanced at the other reviews and now I feel bad. But while there was nice description, it all felt irrelevant and every character (or biographical sketch, whatever they were) sounded the same. I can't say it gave me anything new, at least not to think about: the bit in the cemetery came closest, but all I could think was that [b:A Day of Small Beginnings: A Novel|286513|A Day of Small Beginnings A Novel|Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1268171728s/286513.jpg|277968] did it better. It just felt...very ungrounded. Like it could have been anywhere, about anyone. Gah. I'll have to wait until the discussion and see if they can talk me into liking this, because I didn't particularly enjoy it. ( )

This was such a pleasing read for me. Sebald was a special talent. I am looking forward to reading the two remaining unread titles in his oeuvre that includes Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. ( )

Sempre ouço dizer que um dia livros não serão mais publicados, e serão lidos apenas na internet. Dizem que a internet torna possível uma nova forma de ler livros, impossível com o papel impresso, em que o texto se mesclaria com imagens e vídeos. Meu primeiro argumento contra essa teoria é que o uso de imagens é possível há muito tempo, mas raramente se vê uma imagem que não seja ilustração, mas parte integrante da obra.
Em Os Emigrantes nós vemos isso. Fotos são parte importante das histórias de quatro homens judeus na Europa e nos Estados Unidos do século XX. A caminho de Ithaca (a cidade americana e a cidade mitológica), W. G. Sebald medita sobre a memória e perda a partir das histórias de quatro pessoas que conheceu, e faz um auto-retrato a partir dessas histórias. Interessante notar como o tema do caçador de borboletas - Nabokov - está presente em todas as histórias. ( )

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 his 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. ( )