Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä palvelujen toimittamiseen, toiminnan parantamiseen, analytiikkaan ja (jos et ole kirjautunut sisään) mainostamiseen. Käyttämällä LibraryThingiä ilmaiset, että olet lukenut ja ymmärtänyt käyttöehdot ja yksityisyydensuojakäytännöt. Sivujen ja palveluiden käytön tulee olla näiden ehtojen ja käytäntöjen mukaista.
The road to exile of four men. One is a teacher, fired by the Nazis from his job for having a Jewish ancestor, then inducted into the German army. Of the others, all Jews, one is a surgeon who commits suicide as he is unable to assimilate into British society, a second is an artist, a third becomes a butler in New York.… (lisätietoja)
It has been many years since I read Sebald and I had forgotten how melancholy his writing is. That he is talented is without question. This recounting of the (fictional) lives of four German emigrants is almost unrelentingly depressing. The four stories that Sebald constructs are, for the most part, quite believable…even to the point of making me wonder on occasion if he isn’t simply telling non-fiction stories. But each one also has a few twists that struck me as not quite believable and reiterated that this is, in fact, fiction. Each story, in its way, addresses concerns of trauma and isolation, memory and belonging. I am not quite certain what it is about Sebald’s voice (in addition to his settings) that makes the overall effect so cheerless but I find it both consistent and compelling, in its way. One point that I think is essential to make is that the translation (into British, as opposed to U.S., English) is superb. I can’t read German and so have no way to compare but I find that Michael Hulse’s rendering is really quite extraordinary. ( )
«E si diventava di giorno in giorno, di ora in ora, da una pulsazione del cuore all'altra, sempre più incomprensibili, più poveri di qualità, più astratti».
Sebald racconta l'Olocausto da lontano e insieme da dentro, dal punto di vista di chi, come recita il titolo, è emigrato portando con sé dolore e memoria e ha vissuto nell'impossibilità di dimenticare e in definitiva di ricominciare a vivere. Quattro storie vere ed esemplari, che Sebald indaga da vicino unendovi - soprattutto nel caso del racconto dedicato al pittore Ferber - la propria storia di emigrazione. Inoltrarsi in queste vite genera una tristezza insieme terribile e placida cui è impossibile sottrarsi. Sebald accompagna il lettore facendolo a poco a poco sempre più entrare nelle storie, anche grazie al frequente passaggio alla prima persona attraverso la voce dei personaggi e al suo usuale (per me nuovo, visto che è il suo primo libro che leggo) impiego delle immagini che arricchiscono il testo. ( )
Published in 1992, this book tells the separate stories of four people known by the unnamed narrator (possibly a stand-in for the author). Taken together, they reflect the impact of historical forces in the aftermath of WWII. The first story focuses on the narrator’s friend, Dr. Selwyn, an emigrant to London from Lithuania. The second tells of the narrator’s primary schoolteacher, Paul Bereyter, who fights in the German Army despite being a quarter Jewish. The third relates the story of the narrator’s Great Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who emigrated to America. The fourth deals with the narrator’s friend, Max Ferber, an artist, whose work has grown in popularity when the two meet after two and a half decades apart.
Though the Holocaust is never specifically mentioned, it looms in the background of these characters’ lives. The stories are interspersed with photographs and journal entries. The tone is melancholic. Common themes include memory, cultural displacement, loneliness, the lingering impact of traumatic events on a person’s mental health. The writing is almost mesmerizing in its somber beauty. It is a book that kept me looking for subtle connections among the four stories. It is a memorable work. ( )
His book is tragic, stunningly beautiful, strange, and haunting. What makes it beautiful is the fastidious prose with its sad resigned rhythm—as appealing and hypnotic in Michael Hulse's English translation as in the German original; and also Sebald's wonderfully desolate landscapes and townscapes, where depression rises like mist from quite factual, unemphatic descriptions of people and things.
Yet ''The Emigrants'' is not exactly a fictional memoir. Rather, it is the record of its narrator's investigations into the mysterious memories of others, preserved in stories that dramatize the sometimes treacherous enchantment of memory itself. In the shaping of these stories, Mr. Sebald's book reflects the irresistible retrospective circlings of our contemporary culture, even as he pursues a post-modern fictional inspection of the delicate relationship between memory and history.
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
And the last remnants memory destroys
There is mist that no eye can dispel
My field of corn is but a crop of tears
They come when night falls to search for life
Omistuskirjoitus
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
At the end of september 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.
Sitaatit
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.
Always before our religion lessons, Paul would always top up to the brim the holy water stoup, embellished with a flaming Sacred Heart that was fixed by the door, using (I often saw him do it) the watering can with which he normally watered the geraniums. Because of this, the Beneficiary never managed to put the holy water bottle he always carried in his shiny black pigskin briefcase to use. He did not dare simply to tip out the water from the brimful stoup, and so, in his endeavour to account for the seemingly inexhaustible Sacred Heart, he was torn between his suspicion that systematic malice was involved and the intermittent hope that this was a sign from a Higher Place, perhaps indeed a miracle.
He was an amazingly good whistler; the sound he produced was marvellously rich, exactly like a flute's. And even when he was climbing a mountain, he would with apparent ease whistle whole runs and ties in connected sequence, not just anything, but fine, thoroughly composed passages and melodies that none of us had ever heard before, and which infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever, years later, I rediscovered them in a Bellini opera or a Brahms sonata.
It was not only music, though, that affected Paul in this way; indeed, at any time - in the middle of a lesson, at break, or on one of our outings - he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself.
what he referred to as his condition had been deteriorating in recent years to the point where his claustrophobia made him unable to teach and he saw his pupils, although he had always felt affection for them (he stressed this), as contemptible and repulsive creatures, the very sigh of whom prompted an utterly groundless violence in him on more than one occasion.
Three weeks after she arrived, on every visit, she would still be weeping with the joy of reunion, and three weeks before she left she would again be weeping with the pain of separation. If her stay with us was longer than six weeks, there would be a becalmed period in the middle that she would mostly fill with needlework; but if her stay was shorter there were times when one really did not know whether she was in tears because she was at home at long last or because she was already dreading having to leave again.
Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.
They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. Generally, in fact, they behaved as if their altered condition, so to speak, were a terrible family secret not to be revealed under any circumstances.
He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.
He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, no so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.
Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced - consciousness - and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come.
I began to fear that I would be condemned to spend the rest of my life amongst the patrons of Kissingen who were in all likelihood preoccupied first and foremost with the state of their bowels.
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
I wonder what the three women's names were - Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.
The road to exile of four men. One is a teacher, fired by the Nazis from his job for having a Jewish ancestor, then inducted into the German army. Of the others, all Jews, one is a surgeon who commits suicide as he is unable to assimilate into British society, a second is an artist, a third becomes a butler in New York.
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Perintökirjasto: W. G. Sebald
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