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272 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2019
Dust. Even in this passage, you sense the grey? [I’ve omitted the slightly-long passage she quotes before this comment] When Sebald names colours—as he does a few lines earlier—the brief flares of carmine or blue soon die beneath the dust. The same cindery, silty, dusty feel in each of the four narratives is one way he joins them, one of their alchemical meldings.
If “The Emigrants” were a painting, it would be a quadriptych with charcoal or sepia conte strokes forming oily, smoky labyrinths, each canvas different but sharing texture and tone. Ghosts of names might be scratched into the charcoal, or the hinted shapes of shuddering trees, possibly a train track. But on each canvas, too, would be something tiny and bright: a gleam of glass, an insect wing.
[T]he narratives are unified, yes; but what pushes you forward as you read from one to the next? How do the parts become more? The feel in reading is of a novel, not a collection of stories. But without a plot, what exactly advances us? The questions a spatial narrative asks are not “what happens next?” but “why did this happen?” and, more complexly, “what grows in my mind as I read?”
It's about the loss of Carson's brother, Michael, and comes in a sombre grey box whose lid you gingerly lift to find a paper accordion: a twenty-seven-yard strip of paper folded one-hundred times. At the beginning is a smudged xerox of the Latin poet Catullus' poem 101, an elegy to his own lost brother. Then you turn fold after fold to find the poem's Latin words one by one, each with a (partly made-up) lexical entry. Each entry in turn triggers fragments of memoir, photos, envelopes, letters, stamps, drawings, paintings, blank pages, lines of poetry...