SOURCE: Malin, Irving. Review of The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald. Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 1 (spring 1997): 173-74.

In the following review, Malin assesses Sebald's exploration of history, memory, and meaning in The Emigrants as enigmatic.

This novel, which is surely one of the best novels to appear since World War II, cannot be reviewed briefly. I will try, nevertheless, to emphasize a few details that demand more significant explorations. The novel consists of four parts. Each is an eccentric extended portrait of a person: Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. The narrator tries to discover their pasts; he hopes to confront the reasons for their dramatic acts of re-creation and self-destruction. He tries to find a pattern linking “the emigrants” because he uncannily knows that he is related to them. Thus the novel becomes a search for kinship—literally and symbolically. It is...