Recommendations
Books Like The Emigrants
Exile, memory, and the long aftermath of European catastrophe
If The Emigrants stayed with you — the four narratives, the photographs, the melancholy of people who cannot inhabit the present because the past took something that cannot be replaced — these eight novels share its engagement with exile, its formal innovation, or its portrait of the Holocaust's long shadow.
- 1Buy
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Jacques Austerlitz's gradual recovery of his identity as a Jewish child rescued from Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport — Sebald's most conventionally narrative work and his most emotionally direct engagement with the Holocaust's aftermath; the obvious companion to The Emigrants for readers who want more Sebald, and for many the most powerful of his four prose works
- 2Buy
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
A walking tour of the Suffolk coast that meditates on ruined industries, vanished worlds, and the long aftermath of European catastrophe — Sebald's most formally free-ranging work; recommended after The Emigrants for readers who want to understand how widely his meditative method extends beyond specifically Jewish European history
- 3Buy
Maus
by Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman's interviews with his father Vladek about his survival of the Holocaust, rendered in a graphic novel where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats — the most formally innovative documentary engagement with Holocaust memory in any medium; shares The Emigrants's preoccupation with how memory is transmitted across generations and with what the interviewer-narrator can and cannot recover
- 4Buy
If This Is a Man
by Primo Levi
Levi's account of his survival of Auschwitz — the most direct documentary companion to The Emigrants; where Sebald approaches the Holocaust obliquely through the lives of people whose experience of it can only be partially recovered, Levi speaks from inside the event itself; the two writers together give the fullest literary picture of what the Holocaust did to the people it touched
- 5Buy
The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A renowned pianist arriving in a Central European city and unable to reach any of his commitments — Ishiguro's most formally experimental novel shares The Emigrants's sense of time as fluid and unreliable and its portrait of characters who cannot quite access the life they are trying to live; the dreamlike logic that Sebald applies to memory Ishiguro applies to daily life
- 6Buy
Open City
by Teju Cole
Julius walking through Manhattan and Brussels and meditating on colonial history, memory, and the people he encounters — Cole's debut novel is the most direct literary descendant of Sebald's method: the same peripatetic narrator, the same essayistic digressions triggered by what he sees, and the same preoccupation with what the past has left in the present; where Sebald's subject is European Jewish loss, Cole's is Atlantic colonial loss
- 7Buy
The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi
Twenty-one essays, each named for a chemical element, about Levi's life before, during, and after Auschwitz — Levi's most formally inventive work; shares The Emigrants's structure of multiple discrete narratives organized around a single preoccupation, and its sense that the scientist's attention to matter — to the specific properties of things — is a form of moral testimony
- 8Buy
Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan traveling to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, accompanied by a Ukrainian translator named Alex — Foer's debut shares The Emigrants's structure of a narrator researching a lost European Jewish past and its preoccupation with what can and cannot be recovered; where Sebald's melancholy is quiet and documentary, Foer's is comic and maximalist
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