Alok writes: “The Emigrants is the best book of fiction that I have read this year so far (I read it in January). I felt hopelessly incapable to write anything about it so I am reproducing a review by Cynthia Ozick first published in The New Republic. It is not freely available on the internet and don’t ask me how I got access to new republic archives.The Emigrants by W. G. Sebaldtranslated by Michael Hulse(New Directions, 237 pp., $22.95) There is almost no clarifying publisher’s apparatus surrounding W. G. Sebald’s restless, melancholy and (I am almost sorry to say) sublime narrative quartet. One is compelled–ludicrously, clumsily–to settle for that hapless term, what is a “narrative quartet’?) because the very identity of this work remains murky.
