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The Emigrants is my first approach to W.G. Sebald. For some time I had been reading very enthusiastic comments about his work, but for some reason I had postponed reading him. I had this book sitting on my shelf for months! Now that I have read him, well, if only this one book so far, I concur with those who have praised Sebald to the skies. The Emigrants is indeed a very good book. I am not sure how to define it: is it a novel, a collection of stories, a memoir? The book is sold as fiction, so I assume Sebald must have hinted that it was indeed fiction, or that, based on real life events and lives, he had written some fictional stories. Fact or fiction, ultimately who cares. The Emigrants is a story of memory and loss. Narrated in the first person by Sebald himself (or not exactly him but the events coincide with his own life), he re-creates four lives of German Jews who were forced to emigrate before, during or after one of the two world wars. All four tried to survive in diffrent countries and spent many years trying to forget, apparently leading reasonably successful lives. But their lives, or worse their minds, had been damaged beyond repair. No matter how many years had passed, these individuals still suffered the consequences of Holocaust. Memory would eventually catch up with them and ultimately claim them as victims, either driving them to commit suicide or to seek extintion through electroshock, or to suffer guilt and depression.

All this is told with great control, detachment and a fine sense of irony, which makes the effects of the horrendous events that occured to these people all the more compelling. And, above all, I was impressed by reading a most beautiful prose style. Praise should go too to the wonderful English translation by poet Michael Hulse, with whom Sebald collaborated closely. Sebald seamlessly blends his first person narration into indirect speech and then again into the first person point of view of each protagonist. Powerfully descriptive, detailed to the point of exaperation, I haven't read this kind of English writing in a while. Long-winded, even old-fashioned elegant sentences. Nineteenth century stylists such as De Quincey come to mind. Or Henry James, or Borges, or to name someone from our times, Banville, to give you an idea.

The book is very good, great at times, but it falls short of being a masterpiece. The stories seem to flatten out at the end and become anticlimactic. But maybe this was Sebald's purpose all along.

The book also reminded me to a certain extent to Damilo Kis's A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a book of similar structure but related to the Stalin years.

If anybody else read The Emigrants, I would very much like to read their own comments.