New Directions Paperbook The Emigrants, Book 853, (Paperback)

from Castlelass

Published in 1992, this book tells the separate stories of four people known by the unnamed narrator (possibly a stand-in for the author). Taken together, they reflect the impact of historical forces in the aftermath of WWII. The first story focuses on the narrator's friend, Dr. Selwyn, an emigra...

from kant1066

A couple of years ago, I read and reviewed another of Sebald's novels, "Austerlitz." "The Emigrants" - really more a series of four interlinked short stories - has many of the same themes and seems to deal with them in the same way. While I much preferred "Austerlitz," I liked the stories here as...

from mooingzelda

This is a quietly affecting book that takes a subtle look at the effect of the Holocaust on the lives and descendants of four Jewish men who emigrated away from Germany at various points of the 20th century. The book is divided into four stories told from the point of view of a narrator who has s...

from davidroche

I have had copies of both Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald hanging around for so long, and weighing more heavily each day as my procrastination continued, that Damocles must have given up by now and made an appointment with his bladesmith to make him a replacement sword. I don't k...

from FPdC

Sebald's four narratives with the biographies of four Germans in exile is, as with several other of his books, a mixture of fiction, biography, and essay, in the beautiful and movingly melancholic style of the author. In the stories about a doctor, a teacher, Great Uncle Ambrose, and a painter, S...