The Emigrants (Magill Book Reviews)

W. G. Sebald writes as a German emigrant in England, recalling the lives of other emigrants, Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. Each character tries to live in the present, although his primary identity is located in the past—in lives spent in Lithuania, France, Istanbul, and other parts of the world. They seem to embody much of the displacement and uprooting that marks the twentieth century. Sebald works as a historian, patiently investigating these lives, traveling to their homes and relatives, interviewing people, and speculating on why so many of these characters end up in isolation and despair.

Sebald is a novelist, and it is clear that not only his narratives but the intriguing photographs that accompany them, are not to be taken as straightforward history. Max Ferber, for example, is a composite figure, based on several artists Sebald has befriended. References to other emigrant writers—particularly to Vladimir Nabokov—suggest that Sebald is exploring the theme of the artist as emigrant—estranged from but also trying to assimilate into new societies via his or her art and imagination.

Sebald raises important questions about how people construct their lives, forming narratives every bit as compelling as those found in books. He also aims to blast precise distinctions between fiction and fact, the novel and history. One of the major points of THE EMIGRANTS is that art is a continual journey toward and away from reality—at once a part of this world and apart from it, a form of emigration that the artist ignores at his or her peril.

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. October 20, 1996, p. 14.

Choice. XXXIV, February, 1997, p. 970.

The Guardian. December 19, 1996, pp. 2, 12.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 27, 1996, p. 2.

The New Republic. CCXV, December 16, 1996, p. 33.

The New York Review of Books. XLIV, September 25, 1997, p. 29.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, March 30, 1997, p. 19.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, August 19, 1996, p. 51.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction. XVII, Spring, 1997, p. 173.

The Spectator. CCLXXVII, August 17, 1996, p. 28.

The Times Literary Supplement. July 12, 1996, p. 22.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVI, December 15, 1996, p. 6.