by W. G. Sebald
First published 1997
Dr. Henry Selwyn tends his garden in Norfolk when the narrator encounters him, a man whose past stretches back to Lithuania and forward through a life of displacement. The narrator traces the stories of four emigrants: Selwyn, his primary school teacher Paul Bereyter, his great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth, and the painter Max Ferber. Each man has fled his homeland, carrying invisible wounds across borders and years. Selwyn speaks of his boyhood friend who remained behind while he escaped to England. Bereyter returns to the German village where he once taught, walking the railway tracks of his youth. Adelwarth tends to a friend in American sanitariums, his own mind gradually failing. Ferber works in a Manchester studio, grinding pigments and reconstructing faces from fading photographs. The narrator pieces together their testimonies, documents, and silences, following trails that lead from Eastern Europe to England to America. These men share the weight of survival, the strange guilt of those who escaped while others perished, and the slow erosion that exile works on memory and identity.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: displacement, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: England, Lithuania, Manchester, Norfolk, United States
Period: 20th Century, 21st Century
Paperback · Harvill Pr