The Emigrants

Briliant, Brilliant, Brilliant. This combined with Austerlitz tell stories of 20th century which has many horrible moments. Well, the stories in The Emigrants are beautifully told stories about horrible things. They drift, hazily wandering, stirring up a dreaminess like a narrowboat on an English canal on a perfect summer's day. But it is English weather and it could be bucketing down with rain in a moments notice and you know that, so the tension - when it is going to hit.

I couldn't get into the book until about a third into the third section, Ambros Adelwarth, when I realized that I was really enjoying it and it had stopped putting me to sleep. Not the easiest read, and I'm not really sure what to make of it, but it was nonetheless impressive and moving and enjoyable. I loved the most Ambros's travel diary, Luisa Lanzberg's memoirs, and the connection between Ferber's method of painting and Sebald's writing that comes up at the end.

“Now what was once the most luxurious hotel on the coast of Normandy is a monumental monstrosity half sunk in the sand. Most of the flats have long been empty, their owners having departed this life. But there are still some indestructible ladies who come every summer and haunt the immense edifice. They pull the white dustsheets off the furniture for a few weeks and at night, silent on their biers, they lie in the empty midst of it. They wander along the broad passageways, cross the huge reception rooms, climb and descend the echoing stairs, carefully placing one foot before the other, and in the early mornings they walk their ulcerous poodles and pekes on the promenade.”

“No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city. So many different kinds of buildings, so many different greens. [...] Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. You to go a theatre and a door in the foyer opens into a copse; another time, you turn down a gloomy back street that narrows and narrows till you think you are trapped, whereupon you take one last desperate turn round a corner and find yourself suddenly gazing from a vantage point across the vastest of panoramas. You climb a bare hillside forever and find yourself once more in a shady valley, enter a house gate and are in the street, drift with the bustle in the bazaar and are suddenly amidst gravestones. For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life.”

“Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick at the centre and thinning out towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure.”