It is looking at the photographs, examining them, the German writer WG Sebald undertook the sensitive narration and under control of four lives marked by exile. The first character is called Henry Selwyn. He is seven years old in 1899 when he left his Lithuanian village. His family is found in England. Henry anglicized his name, became surgeon, married a rich heiress. Then, as a sound that gets out, a crumbling stucco, he gradually disintegrates. "In 1960, when I had to give up my practice and my patients, I broke the last ties with what we call the real world. Since then, plants and animals are almost my only interlocutors." It is suicide. Probably because over the last few years homesickness had increasingly "assaulted". Paul Bereyter, he commits suicide in December 1983, at the age of seventy-four years in a German village. Excellent teacher to the point of "boil several days in an old pot, the corpse of a fox found in the forest, sole purpose of recomposing an authentic classroom complete skeleton," it is perceived as an eccentric in his small town. It leaves to the retirement age, fleeing the unbearable memory of Nazi denunciations and the prohibition to teach that signified to him the Third Reich in 1936. The third character, Ambros Adelwarth, is the great-uncle of author. Immigrated to the United States, he became the butler and companion son of a family that descended into madness. The great-uncle, he voluntarily undergoes electroshock then ended his days in a psychiatric sanatorium. The fourth man track track Sebald lives in England, in Manchester, and painted day and night inside an abandoned warehouse. Max Ferber is also an expatriate, in which the memory so long you dig holes acids. Through these four stories, it shows how exile and reasons can be a source of torment. "The misfortune of my youth and my training period was so deeply ingrained in me that he could resurface later produce malignant flowers, weave above my head this poisonous tree canopy that has so clouded and darkened my latter years, "admits Max Ferber, who learned after the fact that his parents were dead and deported dead. The way the writer investigation with us on the men silently inconsolable, how he slowly enters the climate of these souls, their moon-gray color, quiet break, is staggering. Most writers make the reader into their world by immersion. Sebald prefer submersion. This is the end of a road, inside a landscape meticulously described and a sensitive situation that we first showed the face, then the retrospective story, then the hiatus of his characters . But is it really any characters? Henry Paul, Ambros have really existed. Only Max Ferber results from both models. Reality is here the main working material. So much so that the photographs that were at the origin of this book are, with others, reproduced in the text. The house of Henry, the love of Paul, the three-piece suit of Ambros, parents Ferber ... They are there to prove the truth of the story, explains Sebald. Neither the document nor novel, Emigrants, combining narrative and photographs choose sides: literature rather than fiction. Susan Sontag said in 1996 that it was the best book she had read that year. And that a "book is worth reading if it is that of being re-read." We can not agree more.
