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Title: The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse ISBN: 0-8112-1366-8 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (28 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Modern Stendhal
Comment: Sebald's book consists of four long narrative lives of Europeans, living in exile to some degree, before or after the Second World War. It seems the most straightforward thing imaginable, but it isn't.
Each section is like a lingering film camera shot of an innocent family photo. The lens slowly pulls back to reveal slight discoloration of the edges, then the charred page of a photo album, then only at the very end of the view the ruins of the house that held it, the rubble of the city around it.
Sebald blends fiction, memory and history. He weaves pictures and words. He researched his novels by visiting war archives and sifting through piles of postcards, maps, photos and magazine pictures. Some of them end up in his books, but infused with his artist's imagination.
This is what Truman Capote might have written, if he had been a brilliant and sublime novelist instead of a journalistic raconteur.
I'm tempted to omit the fact that this is a book "about" the Holocaust, for fear that people who were assigned to read Eli Weisel in high school will politely click the page on me and think, "OK, well, I know what that's like."
The Holocaust in this book is a negative space, a hole into which things go and never come out. If it is mentioned by name at all, it is only once or twice. It's like the silent, immense black hole that astronomers find in the middle of the Milky Way. The bright stars we watch at night pinwheel around it.
The novel shows how people warp under the weight of their inherited identity, which is something modern Americans and Germans share.
Critics compared Sebald to Ingmar Bergman, Kafka and Proust. But "The Emigrants' " true antecedents are in works just beginning to emerge from the bargain bin of history _ works long obscure, but now with suddenly snowballing reputations, such as Stendhal's unfinished autobiographical "Life of Henri Brulard" or Ezra Pound's "Cantos," which pull history like taffy through poetry.
The evocation of memory throughout the book recalls Stendhal's image, in trying to recall his own childhood, of ancient frescos in ruins. Here's an arm, precisely and vividly painted on plaster. And next to it is bare brick. Whatever it once attached to is gone beyond recall.
For Stendhal, a 19th century French writer, Napoleon and his career were a brilliant meteor that blazed, never forgotten, never fully understood. The Holocaust fills this space in Sebald. Pure light and pure darnkess blind alike. They make you lose sight of things.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautiful and Tragic...A Sublime Masterpiece
Comment: "The Emigrants" is a fictional account of four men, and, more importantly, their journey through space and time and the effects of memory on their lives. Although I read this book in German in 1992, as "Die Ausgewanderten," I only recently read Michael Hulse's brilliant and luminous translation into English. In my opinion, the English work retains the originality, the tragedy, the delicacy and the ephemeral qualities of the original...qualities so perfect for the subject matter.
Although the four subjects of "The Emigrants" are not known to one another, they are related in that each explores the significance of living his life in a land that is not his own. Their stories dramatize, through the memories of each of the four emigrants, the relationship between historical accuracy and memory, a relationship that cannot be denied.
The first section belongs to the retired Dr. Henry Selwyn. Ourwardly, Dr. Selwyn is an elderly Englishman and devoted gardener, but, as with all of Sebald's books, things are not what they might, at first, seem to be. Dr. Selwyn, our narrator learns, is not really English, by birth or by ethnicity. He is, instead, a man who has become quite homesick, and home turns out to be, not surprisingly, a small village in Lithuania that Selwyn has not seen since the date of his departure in 1899.
The second section belongs to Paul Bereyter, a man whose suicide comes to interest the narrator since Paul Bereyter had been the narrator's favorite school teacher in his childhood Germany. The narrator finds, that although he thought he knew Bereyter, he really knew very little about him. And, more interestingly, he finds that Bereyter, for so many years, really didn't know himself. When Bereyter finally finds out who he really is, the truth of the revelation is something he cannot face.
Perhaps the most playful section belongs to Ambros Adelwarth, the long-dead great-uncle of the narrator. Adelwarth is the only one of the four emigrants who fled to the United States, becoming a butler for an ultra-wealthy Jewish family on Long Island. When Ambros becomes the valet and lover of polo-playing Cosmo Solomon, however, he returns to Europe where the narrator traces him from Deauville to Constantinople to Jerusalem. In a lovely dream sequence, the narrator himself, returns to Deauville and the dinner party of the Prince de Guermantes. There, among the assembled aristocrats, are Ambros and Cosmo, sharing a romantic lobster dinner.
The fourth narrative, however, may be the very best. It belongs to one Max Ferber, a Manchester artist, who, in 1939, at the age of 15, was sent by his parents from his native Germany to live in England. Memory plays an important part in Ferber's life as well, and he spends much time studying a book on Tiepolo and the Wurzburg frescoes so that he may more fully recall the summer of 1936, unpleasant as his memories of that summer are.
At the heart of this book, of course, lies the Holocaust, something Sebald's characters feel so deeply, yet never seem to be able to address directly. These are tormented characters, yet they cannot let go of their torment because it forms an integral part of who, and what, they are. Lose that torment and, sadly, they lose themselves.
Sebald is never without his playful, even absurd, side, and it is present in this book as well. Running through his narratives, and culminating in the memoir of Max Ferber's mother, Luisa, are allusions to "the butterfly man." In Ferber's section, "the butterfly man" is a boy of about 10 who chases butterflies in the German resort town of Bad Kissingen. This man is clearly Vladimir Nabokov, for the scene described is exactly the same as one described in Nabokov's own memoir, "Speak, Memory." Whether muse or mentor, "the butterfly man" holds great significance for each of Sebald's characters. And, who but Sebald would have had the imagination and creativity to braid, like a silken thread, the spirit of the most celebrated of all literary emigrees throughout this book?
As in all of Sebald's books, photographs are an integral part of the work and, once again, rather than adding clarity, they seem to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction instead. What is real? What is not? With Sebald, we never really know.
Sebald, himself, said that his "medium is prose, not the novel." "The Emigrants" is not a novel nor should it be approached as one. It is part novel, but it is also an essay, an historical record, a memoir, a musing, an allegory. Sebald's poetic, crystalline and ephemeral prose is perfect for his subject matter.
In "The Emigrants," Sebald has done something I have never seen done before. He has managed to say what is, essentially, not able to be said. Sebald isn't writing outwardly of "Nazis," and the word rarely even appears in the book, yet other, seemingly more benign words, somehow manage to conjure the grimmest evocations of the Holocaust and its repercussions. Sebald is obtuse and oblique, but in his obliqueness he still manages to be more chillingly precise than any other author I have ever encountered.
This is a brilliant book, that much is certain. It is, perhaps, the most brilliant book I have yet to read. It is heartbreaking, melancholy, luminous, playful, chilling and almost unbearably beautiful. In short, it is perfect. It's message seems clear: we cannot emigrate from memory. Our memories are a part of who and what we are and they will be with us for all time. This book reminds us that the dead are as alive as the living, that memory is as real and vibrant as what is happening at this very moment.
"The Emigrants" is a book like no other; not even Sebald, himself, managed to surpass it. This is, quite simply, a masterpiece, a sublime work of art. I don't know how anyone could read it and not come away forever changed.
Rating: 4
Summary: Delicate and Oblique
Comment: The Emigrants tells about the lives of Jewish emigrants from German-speaking territories. Their stories are told through third parties, diaries, and photographs and say more about where they went than where they came from.
What's interesting about it? That it's called "The Emigrants" and not "The Immigrants". What links these people together is where they came from, and how they experienced that act of leaving. Further interesting is that Sebald resists the temptation to spend too much time on what they fled-- he sketches the pain in their past by telling what they did and how they lived after they got to safety. It's oblique, and delicately done.
Of course, as literal-minded as I am I got hung up on whether the stories are True. Even the book avoids the issue by categorizing the book as fiction/history.
It's better to be in the right mood for this book. It's not very active, and it's easy for it to get lost in the whirl of a busy life. Recommended reading for a contemplative mood.
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Title: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulse ISBN: 0811214133 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Austerlitz by Winfried Georg Sebald, Anthea Bell ISBN: 0375756566 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Vertigo by Winfried Georg Sebald, W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse ISBN: 0811214850 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: On the Natural History of Destruction by Winfried Georg Sebald ISBN: 0375504842 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: After Nature by W.G. Sebald ISBN: 0375504850 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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