The Emigrants
The Emigrants tells the stories of four exiled German Jews. These four stories are loosely linked together by an unnamed narrator.
These four tales add up to tell the story of the narrator, another exiled German, obviously based on Sebald himself.
These tales are simply slices of ordinary lives told from the perspective of the narrator, or the narrator interpreting the memories or memoirs of others.
All four stories are haunting and linger in the memory. The writing is beautiful, economic and graceful.
I came to this book by recommendation from the James Yorkston book I read last. It was a recommendation well deserved and I think I will delve further into Sebald’s work.
It seems that there is only a small back catalogue as sadly Sebald was killed in a car accident at age 57.