The Emigrants
Four lives in which the damage surfaces decades after the event, told with photographs that prove nothing.
W. G. Sebald sets out four linked lives: a doctor, a schoolteacher, a great-uncle, and a painter, each an emigrant, most of them Jewish, whose displacement has left a mark that stays quiet for years. Sebald follows each man through a narrator who collects letters, diaries, and recollections, and the account moves slowly toward the moment when an old loss reasserts its hold. In two of the four, that hold proves fatal in later life.
The prose keeps its distance while the harm accumulates, so a reader watches grief operate without a present cause to explain it. For a clinician, the book gives a study of mourning that will not resolve, of injury passed from one generation to the next, and of a catastrophe that lies dormant and then governs a life much later.
Photographs sit inside the text, faces and rooms and documents that accompany the telling without settling what happened. First published in German in 1992, the English translation appeared in 1996.
About the author
Winfried Georg Sebald
Winfried Georg Sebald (1944 to 2001) was a German writer and academic who spent most of his working life in England. He taught European literature at the University of East Anglia, where he later founded a centre for literary translation. He is known for Austerlitz, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo, works of prose fiction that weave together travel, history, and memory, and that set uncaptioned photographs alongside the text.
Details
- 1992
- German
- New Directions
- New Directions
- 240
- 9780811226141