Reading The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald

The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald (first published: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag, 1992)

At my mother's house, we have an old black leather suitcase filled with family pictures. They are mostly 2 x 3 and 3 x 5 black-and-white pictures, many of them of our family members in Greece from over the last 60-70 years. We used to take out the suitcase, open it on a table, and pull out the pictures (though we haven't done that in years). We would spend an enjoyably melancholy hour two talking about the people in the pictures.

Reading The Emigrants is a little like shuffling through those family pictures. Sebald was a German Jew who himself had emigrated to England, where he lived much of his adult life. There are four chapters in the book, each chapter devoted to a family member that the narrator either knew slightly, or not at all. Each chapter explores the life of that relative, pieced together by the narrator from interviews with surviving cousins, friends, and other relatives. The four people are each emigrants: an artist living in northern England, a peripatetic waiter who traveled through much of the world, a German schoolteacher, a retired professor. The time span of the lives is from the 30s to the 70s. Their generally sad lives are reconstructed, at times vividly so. The Holocaust is not referenced directly, but it seems to be there in the background.

There are no plots, no dramatic events. There are a few interesting conversations with people who reveal unknown facets of the lives being investigated. It is very much like sitting at home, for hours, talking about family members we've known, or hardly knew. To me, it's completely absorbing.

It's not exactly memoir, but an investigation in memoir. It is fiction, even though it may be based on real people, and real events. The very real photographs interspersed throughout the text give the book a documentary feel. But then, I believe almost all writing, even memoir, is either definitely fiction, or closely akin to it. This is a wonderful re-creation of lives, and it's full of life.