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.

With 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.

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 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.

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]

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.

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.

W.G. Sebald, who died in a traffic accident in late 2001, was the last great writer of the 20th century. The four novels by Sebald that appeared first in German and then in English translation during the 1990's deserve a place alongside Kafka, Proust, Mann and Nabokov on the shelf devoted to the very best of Modern European literature. Sebald's second prose work, "The Emigrants" consists of four thematically related narratives, all dealing in some way with the impact of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism on modern European life. It's a magisterial work in which Sebald, like his fellow German-language artists Paul Celan and Anselm Kiefer, shows us that there can be art after Auschwitz, but it must look very different and be much darker than any art created before the horror.

W.G. Sebald, who died in a traffic accident in late 2001, was the last great writer of the 20th century. The four novels by Sebald that appeared first in German and then in English translation during the 1990's deserve a place alongside Kafka, Proust, Mann and Nabokov on the shelf devoted to the very best of Modern European literature. Sebald's second prose work, "The Emigrants" consists of four thematically related narratives, all dealing in some way with the impact of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism on modern European life. It's a magisterial work in which Sebald, like his fellow German-language artists Paul Celan and Anselm Kiefer, shows us that there can be art after Auschwitz, but it must look very different and be much darker than any art created before the horror.

In a lot of ways this isn't so much a novel as four linked shorter works, all bound by a common theme. A theme that really isn't explicitly stated but haunts the inhabitants of the novel all the same. This, of course, is the Holocaust, which I don't think is even mentioned once but somehow informs the actions of everyone in the book. The novel follows the nameless narrator as he learns about the lives of four Jews who were affected by the events of years past and how it warped their lives, sometimes without them even realizing it. As other reviewers have pointed out, none of the four people detailed here make it out okay, two of them die by suicide and one is committed but the book doesn't try to make you pity them so much as understand what brought them to the points that it does. And even then it more just states the fact and steps back, letting you decide at what moment everything tipped over. Giving the book another layer, Sebald went and found (or just had lying around) a bunch of random black and white photographs, which he incorporates into the story itself, giving life to locations and adding a bit of reality to descriptions of people and whatnot, making you wonder how much of the book is true and how much he just made up. In the end the story is more about the narrator coming to grips with the legacy of what happened, as it morphs into a story within a story, coming back out just in time for the story to wrap up. Any complaints I have would be minor, maybe a stronger link between the four stories, while sharing the same narrator, a more prominent thematic link might have given the novel as a whole deeper meaning, as it doesn't add up to as much as it could have been, keeping everything so separate. And at points it becomes difficult to figure out when it switches from the narrator describing someone's monologue to the narrator himself just talking again, the lack of quotation marks makes you do some unnecesary work sometimes. But those are minor. Sebald's prose sings at times, whoever translated it made the whole affair easy to read and some portions, like the last few sentences of the third part, are just pure magic. Not exactly a masterpiece but better than merely "good" Sebald gets a lot of credit for taking a commonly written about topic and approaching it from a unique angle, describing the shape of it without even mentioning the object in question and letting the reader fill in the spaces it makes. Unfortunately I think Sebald is no longer with us (I think the first I'd heard of him was his obituary, sadly) but he did leave a few other novels which I hear are just as good or better. It's too bad he didn't give us more, but he gave us what he had and that'll have to be enough.

On the surface, this is a very simple book: separate biographical memoirs about four men known to the author, who, like him, were emigrants from their native Germany. But despite the numerous photographs and wealth of confirming detail, this is fiction, and the subjects are pure invention or at most composites.

The book is an apparent impossibility: a Holocaust novel that is rich and gentle rather than searing. Born of a Catholic family in 1944, Sebald was not a direct victim of the Third Reich, yet he bears its scars, and his books are an attempt to understand them. But he approaches his goal obliquely, not describing the Holocaust but treating it as negative space, as one reader so beautifully expressed it. In consequence, this is an entrancing book, full of human interest and very easy to read. Sebald has a poet's eye for the quirky and odd, but also for everyday normality; in his hands, even lists of place-names or occupations take on a lyric beauty.

Sebald's four subjects have quite different stories. Two of them emigrated at the very start of the century; a third, a schoolteacher from Sebald's own village, spent increasing periods in France or Switzerland, but did not leave competely; only the fourth, a celebrated artist, has a conventional Holocaust story, but the latter part of his story is suffused with the beauty of the normal life of German Jews earlier in the century. Indeed, the whole book is a moving lament for a vanished age and lost way of life, whether it be the grand hotels and great European watering places of the start of the century, or everyday existence in rural Bavaria. This is a requiem for Jew and Gentile alike.

THE EMIGRANTS is the third book by Sebald that I have read. AUSTERLITZ is still my favorite, but this comes close; (I found VERTIGO slightly less compelling). I read this immediately after Anne Michaels' FUGITIVE PIECES, which also traces the post-Holocaust life of a survivor through poetic allusion and images, but I find Sebald even more powerful, by reason of his exquisite simplicity. Earlier this year, I also read Carol Shields' THE STONE DIARIES, which tells the life of an ordinary woman through a similar accumulation of objective detail, rumination, and old photographs. In the right hands, it is a most effective medium.

I read this book, and then I read it again, because I felt like I'd missed something. And if I did, I must have missed it the second time as well, because although I enjoyed this book, and although it is well written, it still doesn't seem to fit the slobbering reviews that are sliding down the book's jacket.
The book is the story of four very interesting Holocaust-era personalities. How much of it is true is kept vague, but the possible truthfulness of it all is accented by old photos that appear nestled captionless throughout the text: photos of people, of relatives, of homes and buildings, copies of newspaper articles and postcards and journals and business cards.
The photos are alluded to throughout the text, and sometimes explained, and the author's words are much easier to visualize after seeing a photo of one angle of what he's writing about.
The book is beautiful, and full of stories--of the four men, of their families, of the author, of Germany, and of the war.
It's a good book, but if it's more than that, then there's something I'm missing.
It's a good book, and it's good enough that I'd consider going back to look again.

I read this book, and then I read it again, because I felt like I'd missed something. And if I did, I must have missed it the second time as well, because although I enjoyed this book, and although it is well written, it still doesn't seem to fit the slobbering reviews that are sliding down the book's jacket.
The book is the story of four very interesting Holocaust-era personalities. How much of it is true is kept vague, but the possible truthfulness of it all is accented by old photos that appear nestled captionless throughout the text: photos of people, of relatives, of homes and buildings, copies of newspaper articles and postcards and journals and business cards.
The photos are alluded to throughout the text, and sometimes explained, and the author's words are much easier to visualize after seeing a photo of one angle of what he's writing about.
The book is beautiful, and full of stories--of the four men, of their families, of the author, of Germany, and of the war.
It's a good book, but if it's more than that, then there's something I'm missing.
It's a good book, and it's good enough that I'd consider going back to look again.

Sebald cooks up an impressive little set of Jewish expatriates, whose fates, without him directly saying as much,are rudely altered by the impact of German politics and military power during the first half of the 20thC. The great fondness with which the author details their life outlines and his putative connections to them, casts a convincing spell with the possible exception, near the end, of the letters from his painter acquaintance's mother which pile such an idyllic image of pre WW1 Germany as to challenge credibility. He uses a device popularised by John Berger in his collaborations with photographer,Jean Mohr in the 1970s. Amongst his 'lives' are nestled a multitude of blurry photos which contrive to authenticate his fictions. Inspite of photography's claims to veracity, these are deliberately softened so as not to distract from the text, which,with its lucid sweep, may have derived from long and sober reflection from photos of places and people long since perished.This is a sustained and powerful manner to express loss and enforced displacement.