9780811213387

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

Introducing to America a unique and most highly acclaimed German author, "The Emigrants" has already won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, and the Literature Nord Prize. At first sight, the four long narratives in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants appear to be straightforward biographies of four people in exile: a painter, an elderly White Russian, Sebald's schoolteacher, and his own eccentric Great Uncle Ambrose. The narrator journeys through England, Austria, and America to salvage their memories of the Holocaust, or, in the case of the suicides, to conduct research. The Emigrants, illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs, seems at times almost like a family album, but of a family destroyed. As the narrator records his impressions, random discoveries, and leaps of association, his voice mixes barely apparent fiction with precise documentary, making out of the four stories one unfathomable requiem. Sebald's style is like no other. His voice shimmers with the beauty of lost things-- elegant, restless, fascinating. He weaves variant forms (travelog, biography, autobiography, historical monograph) into a tapestry for hallucinatory patterns of motif and melody. Putting the question to "realism," "The Emigrants" also offers an allegory for an empathic approach to history: as in "one of those evil German fairy tales in which once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begun--in this case, the remembering, writing and reading."

"Everything, it seems, is paid for....The bill comes around, our dreams send it. The German novelist and scholar W. G. Sebald has written a haunting and limitlessly suggestive book about the most terrible example in our memory. 'The Emigrants' is four narratives about the death that persists within survival. Each is about a German Jew who...escaped the Holocaust yet gradually succumbed to it years later, in his old age....[B]rilliant and somber..."

Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 10/27/1996

"[A] sober, delicate account of displacement, and a classic of its kind. Modest and remote, it resurrects older standards of behaviour, making most contemporary writing seem brash and immature. No book has pleased me more this year."

Anita Brookner, Spectator, 11/16/1996

The Emigrants: Search Results