The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
Irving Malin

W. G. Sebald. The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. New Directions, 1996. 237pp. $23.00.

This novel, which is surely one of the best novels to appear since World War II, cannot be reviewed briefly. I will try, nevertheless, to emphasize a few details that demand more significant explorations. The novel consists of four parts. Each is an eccentric extended portrait of a person: Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Breyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. The narrator tries to discover their pasts; he hopes to confront the reasons for their dramatic acts of re-creation and self-destruction. He tries to find a pattern linking “the emigrants” because he uncannily knows that he is related to them. Thus the novel becomes a search for kinship—literally and symbolically. It is a detective story about origins and endings, about the nature of history and memory. The narrator recognizes that his search is somehow doomed to incompletion.

The novel is filled with photographs: stills of childhood activities and, perhaps, more profoundly, with ones of cemeteries, enigmatic loads, journals, and hotels. The photographs are the remnants of the past. They must be studied as closely as the words of the narrator. Therefore, the novel, in part, is an “album” of what the relationship is between word and image. This is an occult text, one which defies clear, closed meaning and genre. It is autobiography, biography (of four characters), travelogue, meditation on the meaning of the Holocaust, Germany, past and present, self and other, word and world. It uses a four-part structure as does a symphony or Pale Fire and demonstrates that the four parts, usually closed, may be “violations,” not the perfection of closure.

Perhaps the last words of the text express the “final solution” or the mystery of any solution. The narrator sees three women at a window: “Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so that I cannot make out their eyes clearly but I sense that all three are looking across at me.” The vision is a long passage. The narrator cannot understand the relationship of this deception and one elsewhere. He does sense that these women are possibly the three fates: “None, Decume, and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.” The text is a mysterious interpretation of noninterpretation. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald Irving Malin W. G. Sebald. The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. New Directions, 1996. 237pp. $23.00. This novel, which is surely one of the best novels to appear since World War II, cannot be reviewed briefly. I will try, nevertheless, to emphasize a few details that demand more significant explorations. The novel consists of four parts. Each is an eccentric extended portrait of a person: Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Breyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. The narrator tries to discover their pasts; he hopes to confront the reasons for their dramatic acts of re-creation and self-destruction. He tries to find a pattern linking “the emigrants” because he uncannily knows that he is related to them. Thus the novel becomes a search for kinship—literally and symbolically. It is a detective story about origins and endings, about the nature of history and memory. The narrator recognizes that his search is somehow doomed to incompletion. The novel is filled with photographs: stills of childhood activities and, perhaps, more profoundly, with ones of cemeteries, enigmatic loads, journals, and hotels. The photographs are the remnants of the past. They must be studied as closely as the words of the narrator. Therefore, the novel, in part, is an “album” of what the relationship is between word and image. This is an occult text, one which defies clear, closed meaning and genre. It is autobiography, biography (of four characters), travelogue, meditation on the meaning of the Holocaust, Germany, past and present, self and other, word and world. It uses a four-part structure as does a symphony or Pale Fire and demonstrates that the four parts, usually closed, may be “violations,” not the perfection of closure. Perhaps the last words of the text express the “final solution” or the mystery of any solution. The narrator sees three women at a window: “Who the young women are I do not know. The light falls on them from the window in the background, so that I cannot make out their eyes clearly but I sense that all three are looking across at me.” The vision is a long passage. The narrator cannot understand the relationship of this deception and one elsewhere. He does sense that these women are possibly the three fates: “None, Decume, and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.” The text is a mysterious interpretation of noninterpretation. [Irving Malin]

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