SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Ghosts.” New York Review of Books 44, no. 14 (25 September 1997): 29-30.

In the following review, Annan praises The Emigrants as a melancholy study of memory and loss, rather than an example of Holocaust literature, in which Sebald laments the irretrievability of the past and the oblivion into which the dead are cast by the passage of time.

The Emigrants consists of four short biographies told in the first person by the author. Perhaps “displaced persons” or the French dépaysés would better describe these men, who are without the sense of purpose, of going somewhere, implicit in the word “emigrant.” (To be pedantic: the German for “emigrants” is Auswanderer, suggesting people on the move. Die Ausgewanderten—Sebald's original German title—means people who once emigrated.) Sebald's four men aren't going anywhere. They have reached the end of the road. His book is tragic, stunningly beautiful, strange...