Austerlitz

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W.G. Sebald

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Pages: 432 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0140297995

Pub: Penguin Books Ltd

Pub date: 2002-07-04

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 8019

Editorial Review:

WG Sebald's Austerlitz has something of the fractured narrative and wanderlust of his novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, and continues to develop their obsession with history, loss and memory--or more precisely in this case, forgetting. In the decade since the original German publication of Vertigo, Sebald has established himself as indisputably one of Europe's most interesting and lauded writers.
In 1967, the narrator bumps into a man in the salle de pas perdus of Antwerp's Central Station. Thus begins a long if intermittent acquaintance, during which he learns the life story of this stranger, retired architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. Raised as Dafydd Elias by a strict Welsh Calvinist ministry family, it is only at school that Austerlitz learns his true name--and only years later, by a series of chance encounters, that he allows himself to discover the truth of his origins, as a Czech child spirited away from his mother and out of Nazi territory on the Kindertransport. He returns to confront the childhood traumas that have made him feel that "I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life."
In this writer's hands, Austerlitz's tale of personal emotional repression becomes a metaphor for Europe's smothered past. Sebald wittily explores the tricks of time and space, unearthing Europe as an unconscious palimpsest. Delighting in lists and unfeasibly lengthy descriptions, Sebald can turn anything to poetry--even the alleged health benefits of Marienbad's Auschowitz springs become "a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms" (luckily, all his characters seem to be able to hold forth this way). Indeed, Sebald writes with such preternatural lucidity that even a harrowing account of writer's block ironically becomes a celebration of his own quite clearly unblockable virtuosity.

At heart, though, Austerlitz is a serious indictment of modern Europe's "avoidance system", its repeated patterns of personal and institutional forgetting that, even within Austerlitz's own lifetime, have contrived to obscure, ignore and render irretrievable his past and the source of his pain. And yet, despite the bleakness of that picture, the book ends with its hero--and its readers--committed to trying, at least, to remember. --Alan Stewart

Reader Reviews:

In search of truth (2/2 people found this helpful)

I fear for the future of this wonderful book, published months before the author's death. In my eyes, W.G. Sebald deserves a place in the German canon alongside Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Gunter Grass; but I doubt that will happen. One way of looking at this melancholy novel is as a riposte to Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's Ark". In a historical episode of unique evil, Keneally finds heroism, compassion and a happy ending. But, more often than not, the historical facts don't fit into neat blockbuster plotlines, and the novelist who "reimagines" the good stories risks obscuring the underlying truth. That truth is Sebald's goal.

The present-day narrator of "Austerlitz" meets Jacques Austerlitz in a London hotel in the late '90s, and Austerlitz, adopted by a Welsh family in 1939, begins to recount his lifelong quest to unearth his true origin. Yes, it's fiction, but it's true fiction: unnervingly, distressingly close to home; grounded in Sebald's real travels and real researches. Austerlitz's life-story could be that of many people alive today: it could be the life-story of the next person you see in the street. Sebald takes the Holocaust off the cinema screen and makes it real: it was, he forces you to see, a real event with real consequences for real people. This is a book about those consequences, the tangible traces of a past shrouded by time and shame, forever beyond our perception or comprehension.

A warning: Sebald doesn't use paragraphs, instead breaking up the text with grainy, evocative photographs. It's not easy reading, but don't be scared off, as this well-spaced, largish-print edition makes the prose readable; and this is a book of rare quality that rewards careful reading.

Strangely Strange (1/2 people found this helpful)

This tackles the same kind of subject matter as Boy With the Striped Pyjamas but in a much more academic way. It is a strange book. The first 50 pages are so are rather like wading through porridge. When you eventually get to the narrative part you begin to have high hopes, that are then shot down with a disappointing middle and end section.

The book is written in just one massive paragraph - which in itself isn't a great problem, but at times you feel that Sebald is trying to be just too clever and erudite for the good of the story which is essentially about the leading character's journey to find his past - again rooted in Eastern Europe.

Sadly he finds the answers all too easily which means the book becomes more a social comment than a good mystery story. The prose is interspersed with strange black and white maps and photographs that seem to add little to it and at the end it all just peters out with a new character being introduced in the last three pages which just leaves you asking the question why?

Much of the book is rambling in nature which is sad because it does have quality and is well written but the subject matter ends up in disappointment.

Impenetrable (1/3 people found this helpful)

The synopsis for this book reads as just the kind of thing I enjoy. The themes of repression and memory, the war as dispossesion as a vehicle for that and a complex, untraditional narrative. These all tick boxes for me, and indeed all are present within the book. Despite that I just found this book endlessly easy to put down. I did finish it, but it was more a matter of pride than enjoyment. I found the narrative too fragmented to allow me to fully engage with the plot and the characters and because there was very little to connect me to the text I found I lost interest very easily. It should have been a good book, but for me it just wasn't.

Esoteric, atmospheric, irritating but ultimately haunting..... (6/7 people found this helpful)

In 1939 a five year old is sent from Prague to Wales to escape the imminent disaster. He soon forgets all of his previous life and grows up knowing nothing of his past. However in adulthood he comes he is haunted by his unknown identity and by his absence of memories. The loveless Welsh household and the harsh private school are superbly described.

The book is narrated by someone who meets Austerlitz in Belgium. Their friendship continues and they meet up occasionally and Austerlitz continues to tell of the progress he has made. The writing is atmospheric and haunting - goes off into reveries on architecture, fortifications, moths, museum exhibits, maps, etc etc. I have to confess I found some of these quite irritating - and some of the vocabulary seemed deliberately esoteric.......

Austerlitz took photographs continually and the book is liberally illustrated by these. Many are very badly reproduced (deliberately?) and I am not sure how much they finally contributed to the overall narrative.

The reviews were glowing but on finishing reading it I had quite ambivalent feelings - irritation mixed with admiration. However I found that images from this book came back to haunt me days after I had finished it..... perhaps it was better than I gave it credit for!

small pleasures (1/4 people found this helpful)

It is unjust that some of the back-cover blurbs speak so highly of this pseudo-literature. I almost gave up after 50 pages or so; losing patience with the lack of paragraph or chapter breaks, the determined lack of plot and characterisation, and the relentlessly pedantic and impassive tone. There is a hint of purpose after about 200 pages, as the author creeps predictable towards the Holocaust, but any hope of dramatic denouement is snuffed out by a disappointing detour into another barely significant scene. The whole book is a series of hollow digressions, each with an unwarranted attention to the details of objects and artefacts. It hints at feeling but never stirs the imagination. Although his prose style is light and elegant, this is the literary equivalent of finding an old photo album in a stranger's attic: quaint, curious but distant and unmoving.

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