The Emigrants: 853 (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Sublime.--Cynthia Ozick

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. The very greates write of what cannot be written. I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W.G. Sebald.

Sebald is a rare and elusive species, but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.--Anthony Lane

In Sebald's writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death... beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny - an art that was, in the end, Sebald's strange and inscrutable gift.

The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald's books is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote - as was often remarked - like a ghost. He was one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt exhumed from the nineteenth.--Geoff Dyer

An astonishing masterpiece -- perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.--Susan Sontag

Tragic, stunningly beautiful, strange and haunting. The secret of Sebald's appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak.

A masterpiece.--Richard Eder

A writer of almost unclassifiable originality, but whose voice we recognize as indispensable and central to our time.

A writer whose work belongs on the high shelf alongside that of Kafka, Borges, and Proust.

The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be straightforward biographies of elderly Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, a teacher, and his own great-uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, diaries, and documents of the Holocaust, he collects photographs―the enigmatic snapshots that stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family albums. Combining documentary with fiction, Sebald exerts a new magic, and as he puts the question to realism, the four stories merge into one unfathomable requiem.