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I have said that, in Emigrants, Max Sebald relied for content on the stories of real people, including an unnamed narrator who was similar to the real author, Max Sebald. However, although the stories were accounts of peoples’ lives, he added fictional elements to the narrative. I’m going to say that this creative process is similar to the process a painter uses in creating a painting. Recently, I visited the Frick Collection and reveled in the experience of standing close (n

The last section in Emigrants is entitled Max Ferber. Here, our narrator is a youth in his early twenties who escapes life in Germany “for various reasons,” he says, by journeying to 1966-era Manchester, England to be an exchange student. Rather than the city he imagined, he finds himself in a bizarre, deserted, spectral place of ruined nineteenth-century buildings and grime. In keeping with the book’s theme of exile and emigration, he describes the eeriness of the plane flig

The third section of Emigrants, Ambros Adelwarth, is all about revenants, people who return, people who are thought of as dead but come back anyway. The section begins with the narrator speaking—almost as if he were being interviewed. “I have barely any recollection of my own of my great-uncle Adelwarth.” This distinction “of my own” is critical, as the narrator learns about his great-uncle—who died when he was a child—through other family members’ stories, photographs, and f

Last week, I wrote about how Emigrants can be seen as the story of a narrator’s reactions to encounters with four different people—except that reaction is not shown beyond a basic point, and must be inferred by the reader, which may, as a result, invite her/him to experience their own reactions. This post proved to be controversial, with strident demands for clarification and elaboration, so here goes. Dr Henry Selwyn, the first section of the book, ends with the narrator say

A theme I’d like to pursue in thinking about this remarkable book, is that Emigrants is (among other things) about the effect on the narrator of learning the more complete lives of the four men in the story. However, that effect is not spelled out beyond the clear implication that the narrator was very moved by learning these fuller stories. It is left open, so that the reader’s own reaction is not constrained by the narrator’s. In conversation with Dena, (always a pleasant a

In Amazon’s system of classification, Emigrants is found under literature and biography, and the promotion says the book combines elements of biography with fiction. It is a somewhat jarring experience to begin reading the book, perhaps with the expectation that it is fiction, because the four stories, combined with the black and white photographs, that comprise the narrative have such a sharply realistic quality. The photographs in the Henry Selwyn section seem to follow the

This week, a new story, The Emigrants by the late German author W.G. Sebald. I’m reading Michael Hulse’s 1996 translation of the 1992 original in German. Austerlitz was the first book I’d read by Sebald, followed in rapid succession by The Emigrants and Vertigo, then later The Rings of Saturn and his essays. Although Sebald was fluent in English—he taught at a university in England most of his life—he left translation to others. Translation was key to the success of Emigrants