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The Emigrants (Paperback)

by W.G. Sebald (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator) "At the end of september 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of..." (more)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: The Harvill Press; New edition edition (3 Jul 1997)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1860463495
  • ISBN-13: 978-1860463495
  • Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 245,618 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #9 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > S > Sebald, W. G.

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

The Emigrants is a meditation on memory and loss. Sebald re-creates the lives of four exiles--five if you include his oblique self-portrait--through their own accounts, others' recollections and pictures and found objects. But he brings these men before our eyes only to make them fade away, "longing for extinction." Two were eventual suicides, another died in an asylum, the fourth still lived under a "poisonous canopy" more than 40 years after his parents' death in Nazi Germany.

Sebald's own longing is for communion. En route to Ithaca (the real upstate New York location but also the symbolic one), he comes to feel "like a travelling companion of my neighbour in the next lane." After the car speeds away--"the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window--I felt deserted and desolate for a time." Sebald's narrative is purposely moth-holed (butterfly-ridden, actually--there's a recurring Nabokov-with-a-net type), an escape from the prison-house of realism. According to the author, his Uncle Ambros's increasingly improbable tales were the result of "an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions." Luckily for us, Sebald seems to have inherited the same syndrome. --Kerry Fried



A.S. Byatt, Times Literary Supplement

‘Strange, beautiful and terribly moving’ --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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At the end of september 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live. Read the first page
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Gentle and evocative, 9 April 2002
By A Customer
Sebald writes movingly of four different emigrants and ties together their sense of loss and displacement. There are common threads in each story but each life is clearly drawn and it's effect upon Sebald's own life and emotions alluded to rather than stated explicitly.
There is a real sense of place in each story & I especially enjoyed the description of Manchester in the 60's, reminding me of a world I used to know that has now passed.
I'm only sorry that there will be no more from this spare and elegant writer.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A moving book, 6 Feb 2004
By Philippe Horak (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Emigrants (Paperback)
“The Emigrants” firs appear to be mere accounts of four different Jewish emigrants in the twentieth century. But gradually the four narratives merge into a poetic evocation of exile and loss. Mr Sebald’s precise, almost dreamlike writing – along with many beautiful photographs – works its magic. The account of the displacement of these four émigrés is both sober and delicate. Few books convey more about that complex and tragic fate. Michael Hulse’s exquisite translation really makes this book a work of art.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Shadows of the past, 8 Sep 2007
By Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Emigrants (Paperback)
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]
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply Sublime!
I first read the Rings of Saturn a year ago and fell in love with Sebalds prose, I then read Campo Santo which I would recomend also. Read more
Published 2 months ago by P. Root

5.0 out of 5 stars Separation anxiety
The melancholy of separation 24 June, 2002
"The Emigrants" presents itself as an anthology of four biographies, of a doctor, a teacher, a valet and a painter. Read more
Published on 4 Jul 2002 by totalplonker

5.0 out of 5 stars The melancholy of separation
"The Emigrants" presents itself as an anthology of four biographies, of a doctor, a teacher, a valet and a painter. Read more
Published on 24 Jun 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening
This is an astonishing book. Whether in his original German or in this English translation, Sebald has a verbal precision and grace which set off perfectly the flights of the... Read more
Published on 21 Oct 1999 by markalexander100

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