Customer Comments

What to say about this book? It's the only Sebald I've read, so I don't have much to compare it to. It's amazing, and only got better as its very first-person pattern got more distinct, as my brain went from present to past to future past, spiraling around the details that, if they don't quite add up to a personality, add up to a life. One of the most persuasive evocations of what the Holocaust can mean, how it can be approached. The book is an accumulation of fact and artifacts, not plot or even really events, and eventually as a reader you come to realize that the distance between the objects the narrator has accumulatedand the meaning they had for the people who used to own them is the exact distance of understanding the holocaust, the impossible thing I feel like this book manages to hint at how to do. It's the kind of book that splits me--do I suspend myself in the beauty of its attempts at the inexpressible or do I hurtle myself towards trying to penetrate it and parse it out, because maybe its beauty is in its reconstituted self as well? Clear your afternoon and your evening as well. And then give it to someone you're interested in knowing better and talk about it.

Oh, oh, oh. I just finished this book--it's short but potent with some of the most gorgeous prose I've read in a long time.

My book club just read this book and it's great for a solo or group read--the translation captures the part-brutal, part-dreamy language, the central character is absorbing and off-putting, the story is disturbing and entirely intriguing. At 142 pages, it's brief enough to keep the whole book in mind as the central character is inexorably changed by the experiences of this long-gone genocide and the culture that seems to not have been changed by it at all. It's smart, it's funnier than it has any right to be and shifted my understanding of the world just a little.