Austerlitz

by W.G. Sebald

Book Overview

A classic novel of post-war Europe, haunting and timelessly beautiful'The greatest writer of our time' Peter CareyIn 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375756566
• ISBN13: 9780375756566
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Modern Library
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful...

I still havn't gotten further then 30 pages into this book. Each time I pick it up I start at the beginning again and I don't get far before I put it down and get lost in thought. And it can take months before I can pick it up again--it's been years.

Beautifully sad

This novel is very different from any other kind of good literature being written today. It has no chapters or divisions; instead, it is a long monologue briefly interrupted by the unnamed narrator's change of settings and time. Throughout the book, Jacques Austerlitz tells us the story of his life and of his origins, as he goes on discovering them. Raised by a childless Welsh couple, Austerlitz finds out around his 15th year that he is from Jewish descent and that he fled Europe when he was four years old, shortly before the outbreak of WWII.Austerlitz becomes a historian of architecture and travels around Europe (the book is filled with beautiful black and white pictures), but at some point he feels the urgent need to find out about his origins, after a series of nervous breakdowns. What follows is the extraordinary and painful discovery of the fate of his parents and, as a parallel, of Europe in those disastrous years. Sebald's prose is terse and fluid (even if, like me, you don't speak German, you can tell that the translation is really good), his ruminations on a number of subjects is never boring but enlightening, and the story of the narrator and Austerlitz's encounters is incredible but essential to the storyline.Several passages are likely to remain in your memory. For me, some of them were life at his youth's friend's family house in Wales, the naturalist excursions and the sighting of moths, the visit to Marienbad, and especially his conversations with his aged ex-nurse in Prague. One good thing about the book is the descriptions of European cities, which are very inspiring. In short, this novel is very good and rewarding. Its main subject is the search for identity, but by no means is it the only one. Sebald's death late last year gives it an increased sense of nostalgia and melancholy, and it will likely be regarded later as one of the best novels written at the beginning of this enigmatic century.

A Beautiful Elegy

Those of us who love Sebald's writing, love it passionately. I don't think this is an author with whom you can take a middle-of-the-road stance. Either you can't stand his books, or you adore them. I happen to adore them and feel very saddened that Austerlitz must be his last.I think many people are put off by Sebald's long sentences, which can go on for two or three pages or more, as well as his long paragraphs that can go on for forty or fifty pages or more. If they are, they shouldn't be. Sebald wrote beautiful, crystalline prose and his books are surprisingly easy to read.Sebald's books are not conventionally plotted, nor should they be. They are not conventional stories but meditations, revelations, evocations and elegies instead. They end up asking more questions than they answer and, in that way, they stay with you and become a part of you more than most conventionally plotted works ever do.Austerlitz, my favorite Sebald work, is set in various train stations across Europe and chronicles a series of conversations that take place over a thirty year period. These conversations take place between the narrator of the book (who is never named) and a fellow traveler (Austerlitz) whom the narrator first encounters in the main train station in Antwerp, Belgium.The book is slow to start, but gradually, we learn more and more about the mysterious Austerlitz. A native of Prague, Austerlitz learns from his nanny that he was sent out of that city (by train) prior to the arrival of the Nazis. Hence, train stations become very important to him for, in a sense, they symbolize his very survival.A student of architecture, Austerlitz immediately captivates the narrator with his lectures on that subject as well as on art, time and various other subjects. As their friendship deepens and grows, the narrator learns that Austerlitz feels a deep void in the center of his soul that he cannot seem to fill and that it is this void that has spawned his desire to learn, to know. For in knowing about other things, Austerlitz hopes to one day find out who he, himself, really is.Although this book is not broken up into chapters, Sebald, as in his three previous novels, has used photographs to accompany the text. These photographs, which Austerlitz analyzes in the hope of learning something new about himself, also serve as stopping points for the reader.Austerlitz is a brilliant and beautiful meditation about time and memory, about how memory is preserved and how it is destroyed. About the preservation of life in memory's presence and the presence of death in its absence.The characters in Austerlitz, as well as the characters in Sebald's previous novels, try very hard to keep memory alive. They do not want the strand of the past to disintegrate and leave them feeling disoriented.The pace of Austerlitz is perfect...just like the pace one feels when traveling by train, at least in Europe. There is the rush through the station to catch the train and find one's

A Great Loss in the World of Literature

The literary/intellectual world has lost one of its more scintillating stars, when W.G. Sebald, spurred by a heart attack, ran his car into an oncoming traffic and died last week. He was 57 years old. I still haven't recovered fully from the news, since this man's work has deeply influenced my thoughts and the way I read.'Austerlitz', then, is a beautiful swansong. It is eminently more accessible than his previous books, 'The Emigrants', 'The Rings of Saturn', and 'Vertigo'. It is not to say that Austerlitz is any less ruminative than his earlier work, but there's more of a divested narrative thrust in Austerlitz, and it makes for a breezier (can any Sebald work be 'breezy'?) reading (although Sebald altogether does away with paragraphs and chapters for the most part). The translation by Anthea Bell... I haven't made up my mind about it. Michael Hulse had translated Sebald's earlier books (published by New Directions), and although Bell's translation seems sonorous and good, some of the tough, intransigent lyricism of Hulse's translation seems to be missing here.If you're interested in reading Sebald, definitely start with this haunting novel. Sebald does harrowing things with themes of memory and identity, never giving into portraying the horrors of history with broad, sentimental brushstrokes as many storytellers tend to do.After 'Austerlitz', 'The Emigrants' should be a good follow up read. Then 'The Rings'... and 'Vertigo'.There's a book of Sebald that is supposed to come out next year on Germany's participation in the WWII that was criticized by many Germans as being too... well, as being too starkly honest.There is one more unpublished novel that is on its way to publication next year in the states (already published in Germany under the title, "Luftkrieg").I only wonder if there will be any writer in the near future who will speak so eloquently about the act of remembering. Could anyone summon the ghost of Sebald one day, the way Sebald himself had conjured so magically and unforgettably, the spirit of Kafka? One can only wish.

Who are we if our past is taken from us?

Seemingly out of the blue, Sebald has delivered another utterly unique creation. "Austerlitz" is a haunting meditation on the mystery of identity, the passing of time, and the interconnectedness of experience. The Sebaldian digressions are as fascinating as the Sebaldian coincidences are unsettling. A German who knows only too well the German obsession with itemizing, accounting, and tidying up, Sebald succeeds in demonstrating like no other writer I know the unspeakable orderliness and cruelty of the Final Solution. He does so by example, focusing on the life of a Czech orphan who grows up in a foster home in Wales. There is much about the book that is poignant and sad, but nothing that is sentimental.