The Emigrants - W G Sebald

 What a wonderful writer and thinker Sebald was.  Having started with his last masterpiece, Austerlitz, I wondered if an earlier work like The Emigrants could be anywhere near as good.   Yes, it was.   Every bit in every way, as good.   That said, there's only ten years between them and Sebald was a mature thinker before he went anywhere near fiction.   How near to fiction he gets is always the question.

There are four emigrant stories here, linked by a fifth, who is unnamed but resembles Sebald in so many ways.   As ever, the Sebald-narrator encounters these people at various stages in his life and their stories set him off on research trips which incidentally reawaken personal memories for him.   He meets the first, Dr Henry Selwyn, as he (Sebald) is beginning his thirty-year stint as an academic in East Anglia.  Selwyn came to England from Lithuania in the late thirties, not speaking a word of English.  Now he is a fully fledged, reclusive English eccentric.   Next up, in 1984, is Paul Bereyter, who taught our narrator in primary school in Bavaria in the early Fifties.   Paul has committed suicide in a particularly horrible way.  Our narrator returns to Germany and meets Paul's friend Lucy Landau, who arranged for his burial.  She tells him about Paul's life-changing time as an emigrant in France.   As a Jew Paul was forbidden to teach in Nazi Germany.   The third is great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth who seems to have made a huge success of emigrating, becoming the butler to one of the great American millionaire families.   As a young man he was especially close to the son and heir Cosmo Solomon, with whom he travelled the world.  On the eve of the first world war they end up in the Holy Land.   And finally we have Max Ferber, who is first encountered in the bleak midwinter of 1966-7 when Sebald, like our narrator, pitched up in Manchester to begin his research.   Is it a coincidence that Sebald, too, preferred to be called Max?   Ferber is another pre-war child refugee from Germany who has stubbornly remained in Manchester, in a studio down by the docks, where he spends more time scraping off paint from his canvasses than putting it on - as our narrator does with the texts he begins to write as he researches Ferber's back story.   There is no real secret to Ferber's story - he hands it over to our narrator in the form of an account handwritten by his mother (with photographs) who did not get to emigrate.

The photographs, as usual, add verisimilitude to the narrative.   We never know if they really are what they claim to be.   Sometimes they don't seem to link directly to the text - yet they add to it.   As do the epigraphs on the title page of each story.   You sense how carefully Sebald chose them.   Apparently he also supervised the translations of his stories.   He lived and taught in England for almost two-thirds of his life, yet he wrote and published in German.   You read his beautiful lucid texts - you empathise, admire - and you wonder, which I suspect, is exactly what the great man set out to achieve.

Austerlitz - W G Sebald

 I had heard so much about Sebald.   Surely he couldn't be as important as people claimed?   But he is.   Austerlitz is his last novel, published in 2001, the year he died.   It is magnificent beyond belief.

Austerlitz is a novel in 415 pages, consisting of five or six paragraphs and a couple of dozen photos.   Like E L Doctorow, Sebald has mastered the art of incorporating speech into his text without the use of speech marks.   Sebald, however, goes much further.   Austerlitz is the account of the titular character, given over several meetings over more than thirty years, to an unnamed first-person narrator who might be Sebald but probably isn't.   The assumption of many, I know, when the book first came out, was that Austerlitz was Sebald.   That obviously isn't the case.   Austerlitz is Czech and came to the UK in the mid 1930s via Kindertransport.   Sebald was German, wrote in German despite having spent his academic career teaching at UK universities, and wasn't born until 1944.   Germany is a country and German a language that Austerlitz claims to have blocked from his consciousness.

Jacques Austerlitz is the protagonist's real name but he was brought up in Wales as Daffyd Elias, adopted son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his English wife.   It is only when he is fifteen or so, after his 'mother' has died and his 'father' has started a long, grief-stricken decline, that the headmaster at his boarding school tells him his real name, though it is agreed he will be Dafydd Elias until he leaves.

Austerlitz becomes a scholar of institutional architecture, which allows him to travel, which in turn enables him to start a thirty-year quest in search of his birth parents.   All of this - peppered with lectures on the building of prisons, hotels and hospitals - related to the narrator, of whom we learn very little, though whatever he does enables him to travel on a similar scale.   Austerlitz's account becomes more layered the deeper he delves.   In Prague he finds a friend of his mother's who used to babysit him.   So she tells him what his mother told her, and sometimes what his father told his mother who then told the friend.    This is a serious business, leading in his mother's case to the ultimate hotel-sum-prison-cum-asylum, Theresienstadt, built as the highest class spa and converted by the Nazis into their showcase holiday/death camp.   Sebald also plays a joking game, seeing how many times Austerlitz can find himself in places also called Austerlitz.   Brilliantly, this also encompasses the Great Eastern Hotel in London.

It all sounds very complicated and avant garde.   In concept, it is.   In practice - on the page - it isn't at all complicated.   We are swept along.   Where a conventional narrative might rely on tension we are moved by delight and fascination.   I devoured it in thirty page chunks, sometimes gorging myself with a fifty-page sitting.   I simply could not get enough.