"The Emigrants" by Vilhelm Moberg - New Directions Paperbook Edition

RM: Sebald is unique. Should be read by anyone trying to make sense of the history of Europe and by everybody else, really, He captures the reader from the first word and by the end you just wish the book went on and on,

Spain on Aug 17, 2020

Paul Richard Mc Mahon: This is a slow, meditative read. Beautiful writing but the story at times appears undramatic, even prosaic. But the more you read, the more that what is outside the margins, between the lines, unsaid but hinted at, begins to envelop one's reading. In the end this book packs a mighty emotional punch and it brought me deep into powerful feelings of loss, exile and rage at crimes too great to portray justly or maybe even imagine. This book contains a heartbreaking cry (in both senses - tears and anger) for humanity. It has been a long time since I have been so bowled over by a book.

Spain on May 05, 2019

Gabby M: Leaving one's area of origin, and the emotional impact of doing so, is at the heart of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. I thought it was a novel when I picked it out for my Kindle, but it's not: it's a collection of four short stories on a common theme. The first two stories are fairly short and deal with men displaced in Europe as a result of their Jewish heritage during World War 2, and the second two are longer and deal with transnational migrations, with one story having no apparent connection to Jewishness and the second being the most explicitly tied to the Holocaust of all four of them, as well as being the only story primarily based in a female perspective.

All of the stories end in tragedy, and only one is told even in part as a first-person narrative. It gives the book a sense of remove, and the beauty of Sebald's language makes it feel like almost like an elegy in prose form. The power of loss and memory is gorgeously and movingly conveyed...every one of these stories gently rips your heart out. As someone who doesn't particularly enjoy short stories, I found that this was a very well-done collection of them. There aren't too many, and they are all arranged around a...

United States on Jan 03, 2018

Patrick McParland: Integrated stories only work well when each story is of equal interest and quality. That was not the case here so the book never really built to be stronger than the combination of its parts.

United Kingdom on Apr 30, 2017

Monica C Pinheiro: Este é um livro difícil de se classificar - reportagem ou ficção? -, mas incrivelmente bem escrito, com um olhar profundo, descrente e amoroso sobre a condição humana. Quatro histórias de vida, baseadas em personagens reais, nos conduzem ao coração sempre sofrido do emigrante que não consegue se livrar do passado - nem tampouco fazer as pazes com ele . Há, entretanto, uma doçura cativante que permeia todo o texto dessas quatro narrativas, em uma espécie de câmera lenta literária, que por vezes me lembrou a delicadeza do olhar cinematográfico de Ingmar Bergman, no seu perturbador Morangos Silvestres. Assim como a obra de Bergman, o texto de Sebald invade vagarosamente o nosso coração e se instala por lá, sem qualquer intenção de ir embora. Vou sentir saudades deste livro, tocantemente perspicaz e encantador.

Brazil on Sep 21, 2016

P. Grinstead: Like other Sebald works, this takes you to a completely different place and guides you gently through a web of seemingly unrelated narratives allowing you to create your own links and themes. For me this is compulsive reading.

United Kingdom on May 02, 2015

John P. Jones III: ...survive. There have been literally thousands of books written about the Holocaust, and I have read my share of Primo Levi, but WG Sebald's "The Emigrants" has to be in the top five in conveying its absolute horror and devastation. He manages to accomplish this rather elliptically, and with much understatement, by depicting the lives of four individuals who "got out in time," but they were never able to overcome the terrible dislocation that occurred, and in the majority of the cases it resulted in suicide, direct, or incidental, as may very well have been the case with Levi. This dislocation has occurred to others, and continues to occur today, but in terms of graphics, I think of a drawing at a friend's house, of Andrew Jackson, holding an uprooted tree, and if one looks closely, one realizes that the tree is composed of individuals who composed the Cherokee Nation, who were forcibly relocated from their homeland by him.

"The Emigrants" is composed on the stories of four individuals, one from Lithuania, three from Germany, all of whom were very much citizens, and felt as though they belonged to their countries, but who were also Jewish, or only partially Jewish, and in...

United States on Jan 20, 2010

M. Benet: If you love zippy dialogue, flashy repartee, a plot full of tantalizing twists, or just a plain old-fashioned plot, this book is not for you. And that's a pity, too, because you'll miss a rare reading experience that takes you deep into the spectral world of memory without a trace of the distorting effects of nostalgia.
This genre-defying book at times comes across as a memoir, at times as tracts from a meticulous social science project, and at times as pure poetry. In the newness of its from and along with the odd collection of photographs that break up the text, this book can mesmerize and transport you into another world and time ... and all without a single line of dialogue or reference to trendy obsessions of either popular or politically correct culture.
And yet, the book is filled with voices as the narrator -- who may or may not be Sebald himself -- relates the stories of four German emigrants over the course of the twentieth century. In the process of telling their stories by any means he can, be it through the stories of those who knew them, or through their own writings, or through dreams, we come to experience the narrator's own displacements in time and space....

United States on Jul 07, 2002