The Emigrants Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Emigrants Book

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 FriedRead More

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  • Amazon

    Documents the lives of four Jewish emigres in the twentieth century, which later merges into a single evocation of exile and loss.

  • Foyles

    'A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation... I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' Spectator

  • TheBookPeople

    At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish emigres in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss. Written with a bone-dry sense of humour and a fascination with the oddness of existence The Emigrants is highly original in its heady mix of fact, memory and fiction and photographs.

  • BookDepository

    The Emigrants : Paperback : Vintage Publishing : 9780099448884 : 0099448882 : 29 Jun 2011 : I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish emigres in the twentieth century.

  • Pickabook

    W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (Trans)

  • 0099448882
  • 9780099448884
  • W.G. Sebald
  • 7 November 2002
  • Vintage
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 256
  • New edition
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