Rating: 
Summary: A moving book
Review: "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.
Rating:
Summary: A moving book
Review: "The Emigrants" first 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 emigres 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Stunning and Strange
Review: Amazon recommended "The Rings of Saturn" to me so many times I finally bought it. Sebald's writing was so incredible that I bought "The Emigrants" and "Vertigo", too. These are definitely like no other books I have ever read, almost like travelogues through raw, barren landscapes. The juxtaposition of photographs with the text is compelling and absorbing, drawing the reader into the representation of the landscape - the actual, tangible place or thing - as well as the one that Sebald creates with his words. I enjoyed this book more than "The Rings of Saturn" because of the four seemingly different stories that are united by the themes of loss and displacement. Sebald has a very penetrating eye for his character's condition and a displaced, frank way of writing about them to involve the reader in their lives. I think of Sebald's writing like conceptual art - despite the tangential and oblique elements, the idea that is evoked is so strong that it remains with the reader long after the reading. There are few other writers that I've found that can write as poignantly and uniquely about the human condition of alienation and sorrow, with the longing for connection and communion.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting stories of times lost
Review: As elusive as ever, Sebald tackles the lives of four Jewish emigrants. The book reads as a set of memoirs, apparently built around real lives but it would seem that Sebald takes a few literary liberties in piecing their lives together. The stories build one on top of the other. The first, the story of a displaced "Lithuanian" Jew, is the most sketchy and most elusive. Dr. Henry Selwyn seems never been able to adjust to his life in England, and over his long life drifted deeper inside himself until he had become a "hermit" on the grounds of his own home. Yet, Sebald seems able to draw him out of the overgrown garden and relate a few tell-tale anecdotes. The following portraits are more rounded as Sebald seems to have a deeper personal attachment to these persons, culminating in the life of an artist, Max Ferber. This story is apparently drawn from Sebald's relationship with the reclusive British artist, Frank Auerbach, and seems to thematically sum up the sense of isolation that all these persons feel. Ferber, unlike the others, makes the effort to come to grips with his past through dark layered paintings. However, Ferber seems more attached to the scrapings from his paintings and dust that has built up over the years on the floor of his studio, which in his mind more accurately reflects the condition of his mind. All of these persons managed to escape Germany prior to the Holocaust, which hangs like a shroud over this narrative. Sebald chooses to approach this sense of displacement obliquely, with subtle references, never approaching it head on. One of his subjects, Paul Bereyter, the most German of all, could not function anywhere else except in his home country and chose to return after the war, and was Sebald's teacher while in primary school. Bereyter makes his comments against the church and state in childlike ways, endearing himself to his students, but Sebald's research reveals a much deeper character. Haunting stories that evoke memories of times lost. There is a bit of Proust in Sebald's writings as he seems more comfortable in a period that occurred before the industrial juggernaut of the 20th century that seemed to sweep away so much of the past.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting stories of times lost
Review: As elusive as ever, Sebald tackles the lives of four Jewish emigrants. The book reads as a set of memoirs, apparently built around real lives but it would seem that Sebald takes a few literary liberties in piecing their lives together. The stories build one on top of the other. The first, the story of a displaced "Lithuanian" Jew, is the most sketchy and most elusive. Dr. Henry Selwyn seems never been able to adjust to his life in England, and over his long life drifted deeper inside himself until he had become a "hermit" on the grounds of his own home. Yet, Sebald seems able to draw him out of the overgrown garden and relate a few tell-tale anecdotes. The following portraits are more rounded as Sebald seems to have a deeper personal attachment to these persons, culminating in the life of an artist, Max Ferber. This story is apparently drawn from Sebald's relationship with the reclusive British artist, Frank Auerbach, and seems to thematically sum up the sense of isolation that all these persons feel. Ferber, unlike the others, makes the effort to come to grips with his past through dark layered paintings. However, Ferber seems more attached to the scrapings from his paintings and dust that has built up over the years on the floor of his studio, which in his mind more accurately reflects the condition of his mind. All of these persons managed to escape Germany prior to the Holocaust, which hangs like a shroud over this narrative. Sebald chooses to approach this sense of displacement obliquely, with subtle references, never approaching it head on. One of his subjects, Paul Bereyter, the most German of all, could not function anywhere else except in his home country and chose to return after the war, and was Sebald's teacher while in primary school. Bereyter makes his comments against the church and state in childlike ways, endearing himself to his students, but Sebald's research reveals a much deeper character. Haunting stories that evoke memories of times lost. There is a bit of Proust in Sebald's writings as he seems more comfortable in a period that occurred before the industrial juggernaut of the 20th century that seemed to sweep away so much of the past.
Rating:
Summary: Homelessness
Review: I found this book difficult to read and difficult to review. In general, I find it difficult to discuss works of literature which have the Holocaust as a main theme. Sebald's book is written with understatement, eloquence, feeling and irony. It is worth reading, but, in my view, significantly overpraised in the reviews I have read. The book tells the story of five "emigrants" from Germany. There are four chapters devoted to one of the emigrants each and the narrator, who himself seems homeless and a wanderer in many ways. Each of the characters is a loner with difficulty coming to terms with himself (all the main characters in this book are men) and his past. They all have a sad story to tell of exile and loss. Of the four characters, two commit suicide, one dies in an institution, we leave one as he appears to be on his deathbed. Only the narrator survives whole at the end. The book is allusive, told through many voices. The pattern of the stories is that the narrator meets the characters at different points of his life and becomes intrigued by them and seeks out their past. The stories are tossed from voice-to-voice and from time-to-time. We have dream sequences, sections by the narrators, sections from diaries or memoirs, and sections by third parties. The stories are woven around a series of grainy black and white photographs which give a sense of realism and place to an account which frequently is evancescent. I found the use of the photographs effective. In my opinion, the book gives the reader a sense of loss of a high and widely shared European Culture and life of the mind and spirit which is now gone forever. It was dashed by World War I not to speak of the Holocaust. There is a dream of a common culture in which Jews and non-Jews participated and shared alike, with each person bringing his or her own gifts to the mixture. I find this account throughout the book. The discussions in the book of how the Jews in a particular German synagogue opted to forgo the repair of the synagogue roof in WWI so that the German army could use the copper, the discussion of the old, decaying Jewish synagogue in which the narrator sees the graves of people with the same types of passions and dreams as himself. and the story of the young woman engaged to a non-Jewish musician bring home to me the authors attempt to portray a failed dream of a common culture and its brutal aftermath. This book portrays the unhappy fate of culture in the Twentieth Century. It is in its way a meditation of the precious, unique character of the life of each human being.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read
Review: I think The Emigrants is a successful leap from the first book.
Sebald is a conveyor of place; he knows it. Especially good is the haunting dreamlike Manchester. A masterful first person renderer of story, he bobs and weaves the narrative in such a way that his themes arise as if by accident. Use his first book to warm up to his tone and then move on to this. A great companion.
Rating: 
Summary: Connecting the pictures
Review: Once I realized that the stories connect interesting but random photographs, I could not get away from the feeling that the book was not "real" stories. Instead it felt as if it were an assignment. I could not finish the last story.
Rating:
Summary: Memory & Truth
Review: Sebald cooks up an impressive little set of Jewish expatriates, whose fates, without him directly saying as much,are rudely altered by the impact of German politics and military power during the first half of the 20thC. The great fondness with which the author details their life outlines and his putative connections to them, casts a convincing spell with the possible exception, near the end, of the letters from his painter acquaintance's mother which pile such an idyllic image of pre WW1 Germany as to challenge credibility. He uses a device popularised by John Berger in his collaborations with photographer,Jean Mohr in the 1970s. Amongst his 'lives' are nestled a multitude of blurry photos which contrive to authenticate his fictions. Inspite of photography's claims to veracity, these are deliberately softened so as not to distract from the text, which,with its lucid sweep, may have derived from long and sober reflection from photos of places and people long since perished.This is a sustained and powerful manner to express loss and enforced displacement.
Rating:
Summary: The Modern Stendhal
Review: 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.
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