W.G. Sebald

Finished W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants the other day. Very unusual book, perhaps the most unusual I have ever read. It was apparently his first major work. I didn’t really know what to expect; I picked it up after reading his On The Natural History of Destruction – I looked Sebald up and discovered that he was supposed to be known for the dreamy, slightly surreal and deeply melancholy quality of his fiction, all appealing qualities for me. Thing is, The Emigrants is not entirely fiction. It mostly is, I suspect, but it does not read as such. I say “I suspect” because it is not at all clear where memoir crosses over into invention.

The book is a collection of four stories, all written in the first person, and in all four the narrator is basically real-life Sebald himself – a German professor who moves to England to teach languages and translation. They all start out by recounting an ordinary experience – traveling to Manchester for a semester of research, looking for an apartment – exactly the way they would, and most likely did, happen to Sebald in real life. A memoir of the quotidian, if you will. In every story, however, the narrator eventually meets, or comes to relate how he once met, the central character, and here the line quickly blurs, though since factual elements persist, or so it seems to me at least, to the end of each story, there is no real line; it dissipates subtly into invention until the reader feels like he is simply reading a story.

What’s even more unusual is that the book is illustrated, if that is the right word, with a large number of photos depcting people and places in the stories, initially giving everything an imprimatur of absolute, documentary certainty. The vast majority of these, of course, were never intended to be illustrations. Sebald merely found images that fit, or, perhaps in some cases wrote prose to fit the images. The effect is curious but powerful – rationally we realize a particular segment of the story cannot be literally true, and the photo isn’t really of the thing being written about just then, yet the image and the text on the page together draw us in more strongly than either would do on its own.

One of the four stories – the one about the narrator’s elementary school teacher – I suspect is straight reminiscence. All the details match up neatly with Sebald’s life, down to the towns he mentions. Though he uses only the first letters, they are in fact the first letters of the names of German towns where Sebald grew up. The accompanying photos of schoolchildren are almost certainly of Sebald and his classmates. The rest of the stories are far less factual. Each central character is probably based on a real person to some extent – the reclusive doctor in the first story, especially, has a palpable believability about him – but the events of their lives Sebald eventually comes to recount are the locus of his message and creativity. All four are Jews of German origin. All four had their lives upended by the Holocaust, but all survived and none experienced deportations or concentration camps, though they certainly had family members who did. Sebald’s concern here isn’t with surviving the Holocaust directly. Rather, it is with the experience of being removed from one’s origins, first physically but eventually, through the passage of time, emotionally. There is no lesson here. It may seem at times that Sebald implies a disappointment with how much personal history his characters lost over the years, yet at the same time he makes them continue to do everything they can to distance themselves from their past further still. The pain of even an indirect experience is too much for them.

There is really only one bit about the book that made me raise my eyebrows briefly. The character of one of the stories – the longest and most fantastical of the bunch, it had something of Mann’s Magic Mountain about it – is Sebald’s great-uncle, making Sebald himself, according to this story at least, part Jewish. In real life, he was not. The whole book, of course, is Sebald’s answer to the imperative that every post-war German writer deals with the Holocaust. This is his way. But does one have to pretend to be that which one is writing about? Especially in a book designed to blur the line between memory and invention? Has he gone just a tad too far? I don’t know. Suffice it to say that even if you see this as a fault, it is a small price to pay for the melancholy fascination of The Emigrants.