SOURCE: Angier, Carole. “They Forgot to Remember to Forget.” Spectator 277, no. 8770 (17 August 1996): 28-30.

In the following review, Angier praises The Emigrants asserting that it “may be a masterpiece,” and lauds the treatment of such themes as exile, memory, art, and loss within the book.

The Emigrants is not only about emigration. It is about internal as well as external exile; it is about loss, and above all about memory. Finally, therefore, it is about art. Another great German writer, Günther Grass, has said that writing is the naming of lost things; that without loss there would be no literature. The Emigrants both explores and embodies this theme. It is quiet and understated, and it has taken us three years (and three German prizes) to translate it. But I think it may be a masterpiece.

It begins—not on page one, but internally—from the central fact of...