Reading 1001 discussion

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There is something unexplainable about Sebald's works about the way the narrative gradually sucks you in into some sort of a magical literary experience. Here, we have four seemingly distinct life stories (some entirely true, others made up from other stories) about people who have appeared at one point or other in Sebald's life. A common thread is that the protagonists are all emigrants, most of Jewish background; we often find out about the lifes from third-person accounts or from other documents, rarely from the emigrants themsleves directly. Each of the stories is gradually longer than the preceding one, and they all evoke the sometimes chaotic nature of exile, with its losses and its wanderings. It's with the fourth narrative about Max Aurach/Ferber, loosely based on painter Frank Auerbach, that all the preceding stories take a greater meaning.

I loved this book, although it's overwhelmingly sad, with its themes of loss of all kinds. The four stories, some based on or triggered by a real person's life, focus on leaving one's homeland and the rootlessness that comes from this. The sentence structure gives them a dreamlike quality and a sense of overlapping waves of memory and feeling, while photographs ground us in an apparent reality.