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The EmigrantsEditions
Review
Gentle yet razor-sharp, elegiac without ever being sentimental... Nobody else writes prose like this, and the fact that it is translated from the German should not put anybody off. For Sebald has lived in Britain for twenty years: he is bilingual and worked on the translations with the poet Michael Hulse - his work, as it appears in English, should not be regarded as translated. The critic James Wood asserts that Sebald is the most important writer since Beckett. Such a claim cannot be proven, but it gives a measure of the impact of this slim volume. Read it, then read it again. Then read his next melancholy masterpiece, The Rings Of Saturn |
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John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
This extraordinary work of fiction has been widely acclaimed as a masterpiece since its appearance in 1996, but it is very hard to characterize. It consists of four stories about Jewish exiles, interspersed with grainy, mysterious photographs. There is Dr Henry Selwyn, "a kind of ornamental hermit" in an old house outside Norwich; a schoolteacher in Germany ("In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life..."); a painter in post-war Manchester, loosely based on Auerbach; and "uncle" Ambros Adelwarth, butler to a rich, eccentric American called Cosmo. But it is Sebald's writing that gives this book its special distinction and generates the unique evocation of loss.
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