W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants ****

 The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character.

W.G. Sebald has a completely distinctive style, a confluence of old-fashionable prose, a consistent narrator (a solo traveler in remote or off-season European locations), overlapping storytellers explaining their personal histories, and a sense that the book is actually about something that goes purposely unmentioned. He creates a pervasive mood of melancholy and nostalgia for a lost world. And there are those enigmatic photographs.

The Emigrants is filled with Sebaldian images:

• A house with "hidden passageways [that] branched off, running behind the walls in such a way that the servants, ceaselessly hurrying to an fro laden with coal scuttles, baskets of firewood, cleaning materials, bed linen and tea trays, never had to cross the paths of their betters."
• The frozen remains of a mountain guide released by a glacier after 72 years.
• A former mental health spa now occupied by a beekeeper.
• A stay in the crumbling nineteenth-century Midland Hotel in Manchester. 
• A visit to an overgrown (and locked) Jewish cemetery.
• A empty streets in the formerly bustling resort town of Deauville.

"If one pauses for a while before the seemingly unoccupied houses, ... one of the closed window shutters on the top floor will open slightly, a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move silently about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by"

Our narrator consistently describes decayed landscapes that obscure the hidden activities of an unfavored group. 

I've noticed that everyone's favorite Sebald book tends to be whichever one they read first, whichever one introduced them to his unique genius. I read The Rings of Saturn many years ago, so I naturally prefer it, or rather my memory of it, to The Emigrants. Would that preference survive a re-reading? We'll find out some day.