Rating: 
Summary: Maybe the best of all
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Good read for the melancholic
Review: This was my second book by Sebald and like Austerlitz, I experienced a deep, almost surreal sense of gloom as flashes of images kept playing in my mind. It was so hypnotic - I almost felt like I was floating in air. I attribute it to Sebald's unique talent -- he's able to lead readers to a totally new plane, so to speak, where the plot of the story becomes so secondary -- all that matters is the journey and the sense of how the characters' thoughts and pain become yours. That said, this book (and Austerlitz) isn't exactly for everyone. I've tried recommending it some friends who felt it was too "meandering and emotive". I didn't quite agree with them, but lately, I'm beginning to see their point -- you've got to be in a right frame of mind to enjoy Sebald. If you're a sucker for plot-drive, high-octane stories, then this may not be for you, but if you're more contemplative and patient, this could be the most rewarding book you'll read in a long while.
Rating:
Summary: Walking the curve of the globe
Review: WG Sebald continues to show us that his gifts as a writer are not only unique but are consistently fine. Having read all of his translated books I find that I never offered my thoughts about "The Emigrants" on this platform. Perhaps that is because after reading this powerful little tome I was speechless, or in awe, or felt inadequate to the task of commenting on a masterpiece. Having just read "Austerlitz" I returned to the Emigrants to see if all the promise of what his latest book brings was present in his first translated volume. Without hesitation ........... it is. The Emigrants weaves the lives of four people who wander the terrain of postwar world in search of discovering their true past in that nightmare of history they have survived. Sebald is eloquent in his use of language, spare in his style of writing, and wholly individual in his method of presenting not ony the word but related photographs to mimic the melange of fragments that piece together to form our histories.
He is simply one of the literary treasures of our day.
Rating:
Summary: Shattered Histories, Shattered lives
Review: While at first reading the four occluded biographies that comprise "The Emigrants" may seem almost happenstance episodes in the lives of four unrelated characters, these are actually histories, painstakingly and painfully assembled (albeit invented?) by the late W.G. Sebald. I came to the book believing (because of a misleading review I can't re-find) that it was about people driven from Europe by the Holocaust. But, if anything and if possible, the forces that sent Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber from their continental European homelands to Britain and the America run even deeper than that. And Sebald or the narrator (I guess both, with a patience that spans decades goes to odd corners of all these places to gather fragments of stories. He retraces parts of the journeys of people who with only one exception, he was never all that close to in search of the cause of emigration. This narrator is selective in a way that itself is puzzling and worth meditation. One wonders, often for pages at a time, why is the narrator going down this path. After encountering and hearing out each of these subjects (or hearing other informants retell their stories), he travels to one or more of the places that mattered in their lives. This takes him to an almost abandoned sanatorium in Ithaca, New York, an untended Jewish cemetery in a small German town, to a once trendy but now seedy Normandy casino and into dusty personal journals and diaries. His research while intensive is not all aimed at drawing some greater truth or even satisfying conclusion but in creating a collage made symbolically of shattered bits and pieces of lives that were also quite shattered. But you usually are left the work of figuring out exactly what shattered them. Why, for example, did Great Uncle Ambros Adelwarth who very competently and authoritatively managed the lives of others fall steadily into an undiagnosable ennui? Included are many, sometimes puzzling black and white pictures that pictorialize the narrator's quest, yet deepen rather than explicate the mystery of the lives he traces. For me the overall effect was to understand, or rather, feel exile in a way that other books about that experience cannot begin to touch. Sebald died in December 2001 in a car accident. It would be a fitting memorial for someone else to assemble but not systematize the fragments of his life, only one of which is this remarkable "fiction".
| 
