Publisher’s
write-up :
‘At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the
lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as
Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four
narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.’
The Emigrants is a collection of four short stories written
by the writer and academic W.G. Sebald, who wrote the book originally in
German. As the title suggests, this narrates the story of four emigrants, all
of whom are jews who fled Germany to avoid prosecution and living in their adopted
countries.
The first story is about a doctor living in the English country
side, Dr. Henry Selwyn, the second is that of a teacher, Paul Bereyter who now
lives in Switzerland, the third is Amboros, who lives in the United States with
his rich relatives – with whom he travels to expensive places around the world,
and the last character is Max Ferber, who is a young painter in Manchester,
whom the author meets.
The story dealt with different aspects of life, particularly
that of emigrants, where there is always a yearning to belong to your new
place, along with the nostalgia for the place that you had left but you have your
reasons why it is implausible to move back to the previous place. This was best
shown in the story of Paul, who struggled to belong in his new place even though
he was well respected and always had a longing for the mountains in Bavaria.
The author had the setting described well in each of the stories,
be it the countryside in the story of Dr. Selwyn or the various towns of
Switzerland. The best use of a city was the description of Manchester in the
story of Max, where I felt the author had used the city well. The author also
has a unique style of adding pictures without any caption and this allowed me
to visualize a lot of these scenes described to me by the author.
The story I had liked the least was the one of Amboros,
where there were too many characters for one to get lost in the sea of information
and they keep travelling around the world, going from place to place. It felt more
like reading a travelogue than a novel. Unless these characters were completely
based on real people, I felt the stories were unnecessarily sad, even stories
that I felt which did not need such levels of sadness for it to move the reader
(such as the story of Paul), and after a point, it becomes predictable, I had
the shock while reading the story of Dr. Selwyn, but eventually, I started expecting
such events.
On the whole, I would say that it was a good read, not the
easiest of reads, but still has got some interesting stories. I award the book
a rating of six on ten, and I am certainly interested in trying the other works
of the writer.
Rating – 6/10
Have a nice day,
Andy
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