Austerlitz

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.

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 well, as being too starkly honest.There is one more unpublished novel that is on its way to publication next year in the states (already published in Germany under the title, "Luftkrieg").I only wonder if there will be any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.

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.