The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be plain accounts of the lives of Jewish emigrants in Norfolk, Austria, America and Manchester. There are even a great many photographs amid the text, which give the impression that the reader is poring over a family album, trying to tease out the truth behind the fading images. However, as Sebald s prose gradually exerts a powerful hold on the reader, the stories merge into one overwhelming evocation of the experience of exile and loss of homeland. Throughout the book the figure of Nabokov is used to symbolise the modern emigrant. Just as survival forced Nabokov to turn his back on four different homelands in the course of his life, so the emigrants in Sebald s stories are destined to wander far and wide, forever displaced and destined never to reach an end to their restless search for home and identity.

• ISBN10: 0811213382
• ISBN13: 9780811213387
• Publish Date: 31 December 1996
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 October 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 237
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

Leaving one's area of origin, and the emotional impact of doing so, is at the heart of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. I thought it was a novel when I picked it out for my Kindle, but it's not: it's a collection of four short stories on a common theme. The first two stories are fairly short and deal with men displaced in Europe as a result of their Jewish heritage during World War 2, and the second two are longer and deal with transnational migrations, with one story having no apparent connection to Jewishness and the second being the most explicitly tied to the Holocaust of all four of them, as well as being the only story primarily based in a female perspective.

All of the stories end in tragedy, and only one is told even in part as a first-person narrative. It gives the book a sense of remove, and the beauty of Sebald's language makes it feel like almost like an elegy in prose form. The power of loss and memory is gorgeously and movingly conveyed...every one of these stories gently rips your heart out. As someone who doesn't particularly enjoy short stories, I found that this was a very well-done collection of them. There aren't too many, and they are all arranged around a similar theme in a way that really works and keeps the stories flowing together and seeming like one piece. Like four movements to a piece of music. I would definitely recommend it, but maybe if you're not in a low mood already, because as lovely as it is, it's a downer.