Austerlitz

by W.G. Sebald, Anthea Bell (Translator), James Wood (Introduction)

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

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

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Literature, Novels, Holocaust

448 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.

At the time of his death at the age of only 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors, and was tipped as a possible future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edit July 2024: I finally got the time to peruse the NY Times The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.I am happy that Austerlitz got a deserved place in Top 10 (no.8). I would have probably put it in top5.

1st Prize. Favourite Book read in 2021

I’ve wanted to read this novel for a long time but I was also intimidated by its structure. I recently acquired two books that are considered Sebaldian and I realised I could not read them before I cover their inspiration. When I got the opportunity to read this together with Reading the 20th Century group, I knew this was the moment I have been waiting for.

I will not lie to you, it was tough at the beginning. There are no paragraphs and the first 60 pages or so consist mainly of long descriptions of building: the Antwerp train station and a fort being the most memorable. Train stations and the fort will prove to be a very important part of this book so it is worth paying attention to those tedious pages. The book is also sprinkled here and there with black and white pictures of some of the sceneries and buildings described. I almost gave up after 50 pages and even wrote the following farewell review:

For the oral part of the Cambridge English exam you are given a few pictures and are told to imagine stories out of them. It feels like this novel is written the same way. Sebald (randomly) chooses a number of pictures from his collection and gives himself the challenge to invent stories from them and put everything in one book. Then, he writes excruciatingly boring details of Belgian architecture. After realising that even he falls asleep while reading his writing, he decides to introduce some resemblance of a plot and to give something to read to critics and literature enthusiasts. He even adds some magical realism because how else can you name those coincidental and convenient encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz. .

And then something clicked. I became entranced by the prose and I could not stop reading. I started to admire the construction, the words and the cleverness of the author. I soon realised that nothing is random in this book, every word and picture are well thought out in advance.

"No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. "

The sentence explains what part of this book is about although it is written around page 30, long before the plot gets going. It is a novel about the untrustworthiness of memory and how its suppression can affect our life deeply. It is a book about the past and how it is always lurking in the present through small signs. Those building that are described so much in detail are an example of such elements. Finally, it is a book about the horrors of the Holocaust and identity.

Austerlitz was adopted by a Welsh family when he was 4 years old and grows up with no recollection of his past. Only later, when his foster parents die, he is told that his real name is Jaques Austerlitz and that he was saved from the Holocaust by being a part of a kindertransit. After suffering a few nervous breakdowns, he decides to gather more information about his past.

The story is told by Austerlitz to an unnamed narrator during several chance encounters around Europe. This way, we receive a fragmented biography told through the lens of another character, maybe Sebald himself. This technique distances the reader from the main character, the way memory is sometimes distant and hard to grasp for its possessor. Due to the structure, the meandering prose and the narrative choices I sometimes had problems following the text. I alternated between perfect trance like concentration and pages that I could not follow and had to re-read.

There are two reasons I finally gave this book 5*. The first one is that it had a few powerful moments where I felt I could not breathe. One memorable scene was when Agata, Austerlitz’ mother, is visited by a German soldier and told exactly what to pack for her deportation to the Ghetto. It is hard to understand how a description of items can have such a strong emotional effect but, similarly, Sebald pulls it off many times during this novel. Second reason, and somewhat connected, is that I am sick of melodramatic books about the 2nd World War. The ones that scream at you how horrible everything was and you feel manipulated to cry and cry. Sebald still made me feel gutted but the technique was subtle and I really appreciated the change.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The waiting hall of the Antwerp central station – Salle des pas perdus – hall of lost steps – is the symbol of the past in the book…

Austerlitz commented in passing of this lady, whose peroxide-blond hair was piled up into a sort of bird’s nest, that she was the goddess of time past. And on the wall behind her, under the lion crest of the kingdom of Belgium, there was indeed a mighty clock, the dominating feature of the buffet, with a hand some six feet long traveling round a dial which had once been gilded, but was now blackened by railway soot and tobacco smoke.

Deprived of his past by the cataclysmic turns of history Jacques Austerlitz – a historian of architecture – tries desperately to regain what has gone forever… And he is morbidly obsessed with the illusory qualities of time…

…if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another?

The past is irretrievably lost and only its echo still lingers on: old things, documents, books, buildings, statues, paintings, objets d’art…

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the kinds of reviews to write, the ecstatically enthusiastic ones are the worst, I think. No matter how much you try to pepper your review with big words and thoughtful commentary, you inevitably end up sounding like a gum-chomping tween girl squealing the paint off the walls about some boy band that looks like it should be directed to a hormone therapy ward.

Being openly enthusiastic about virtually anything can be tough—because it makes you vulnerable. It's like this: in a moment of weakness, you blurt out your unchecked passion for this or that, and along comes some dismissive asshole who deflates your earnest affection with a bit of cheap snark. (Mike Reynolds's review of The Road comes to mind here. But he's one of my favorite dismissive assholes.) Very much in the same way that I just now condescendingly patted the musical tastes of tween girls on the head and sent them on their way in the previous paragraph—when in fact some of them would clearly cut a bitch to get within fellating distance of a Jonas brother (or whatever twerps they happen to be listening to this week).

And W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz is an especially difficult book for me to get all OMFG!!! about because it's not the kind of book that everyone is going to like. I myself know a few people who would probably rather undergo dangerous elective surgery than plow through three hundred pages of slow-burning rumination about memory and, particularly, the Holocaust. Austerlitz is a specialized novel for a specialized audience—which certainly isn't to say a smarter or more refined audience. (Because that's rude to say, I guess, even though it may be true.)

I glanced through a couple of the negative reviews of this book on Goodreads, and they were especially idiotic. Their idiocy is not derived from their dislike of the book, however, but from the reasons they cite for disliking it. There was one woman in particular (God love her, as my high school Old Testament teacher Father Bly would say, dismissively) who lamented the lack of entertainment value in the book. And it was clear from contextual clues that 'entertainment' implied an escapist, reasonably upbeat, and eventful narrative. I hate this so much! Art (and yes—books are art!) isn't here to pacify you; it's not another tool at your disposal in the cultural toolbox to turn you into a drooling, thoughtless catatonic. You really weren't put here to spend all your off-time golfing and sticking your hand down your pants in front of the television. I thought this was fairly obviously.

There's this nitwit I work with, for instance, who is traumatized by any day that isn't sunny, warm, and encouraging, who refuses to see any movie that isn't expressly feel-good, and who (proudly) never reads books of any kind—because they would divert her from truly fun and mindless activities. It should go without saying that although I am a non-violent person I occasionally have fantasies about entering her office with a sledgehammer and destroying everything in sight. You should see the look on her dumb face when I show up at the door with that sledgehammer! Priceless! (This is what twenty-first century Middle America does to a man.)

Anyway. Did I mention it is just before 4 AM when I am writing this? I was restless in bed (not because of this review, mind you) and I thought I'd get the review of this book over with. Did you just see that? I said 'get it over with.' But why do I need to write a review at all? It's not like the entire online community is waiting breathlessly for me to weigh in with my opinion of this or any book.

Well, let me tell you why: Because if I read a book and I really, really, really love it (as I loved Austerlitz) I have to scream about it like a girl at a Justin Bieber concert. I become evangelical about these things. It's a compulsion.

The ironic thing is that I've discharged my burden without actually telling you much of anything about this book or why you should or should not read it. Which is kind of a shame. I guess I'm hoping my enthusiasm will speak for itself. But in an eleventh hour bid at relevance, let me say this: If you enjoy slow, meditative, labyrinthine remembrances about (I suppose) our alienation from our own past, then read this book. But if you only want to be 'entertained' from now until the moment that you die, then what are you even doing here? Killing time?

[Luís · Rating 5 out of 5]

Austerlitz.
Great Napoleonic victory. How many people can boast that having this surname is not banal?
They are probably people with extraordinary destinies. It would not be easy to understand why such people remain in the shadows.
Jacques Austerlitz, the main character of this WG Sebald book, is one of those scholars, a passionate philosopher, a man in search of his past, that of his family. What was his life like before the age of 4 and a half? Has he always called Austerlitz? Has he still lived in Wales, in a pastor's family?
That's a man who, page by page, rebuilds his memory and seeks to understand his past, of his parents, from Wales to Czechoslovakia, via Germany, Paris, London, and others. Still others a memory built by visiting places, libraries, cities, and fortifications, through meetings with other enthusiasts, by crossroads between history and current events, between his knowledge and those of his interlocutors, my readings, by an investigation work.
The narrator, who had Jacques Austerlitz as a teacher, talks with him. Jacques is now a lecturer at the London Art History Institute, but he has had many other interests, different passions, lives, and trades.
It's an exciting book, which "deserves," not easy to read and follow ... sometimes destabilizing. However, the narrators intersect, their words support each other, and their knowledge of Jacques mingles with the narrator or people they meet.
None of the people Jacques will encounter is commonplace. Yet, all who have a wealth of knowledge are passionate about a place, a city, or a fortification. They have a story, a life to tell. They are almost obsessed with each other in their corner, with insects or butterflies and parrots, and with the history of cities, railway stations, cemeteries, and quiet buildings today, which have been places of torture and deportation.
Austerlitz forces us to reflect on man's vanity and specific human constructions, fortresses obsolete and overcome by the progress they have been completing. Constructed to defend and ultimately used to kill innocent people, built modern libraries to promote the culture and leave a trace in the history of their initiator. And finally, unsuitable for promoting culture, a book made to recall a past that we seek to move aside, the importance of traces of spent not forgetting a message from a German anti-Nazi author.
Each word weighed, each description of the place, and each historical or cultural reference is a pleasure. What knowledge accumulated was made available to the reader. It may be a little too complicated, sometimes seeming accumulated unnecessarily.
The book's construction is not bland, which can be repulsive. Some will close this book after 20 pages. The author built it without any chapter, paragraph, or quotation mark. But we do not read poetry, melancholy cultural and historical references, philosophical or sociological reflections, or the construction of memory "diagonally." No! We cling!
I come out a little dizzy but happy.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Turning the pages of the novel Austerlitz makes for one powerful, emotionally wrenching experience. Here's what esteemed critic Michiko Kakutani wrote as part of her New York Times review: "We are transported to a memoryscape - a twilight, fogbound world of half-remembered images and ghosts that is reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Kafka's troubling fables of guilt and apprehension and, of course, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.''

With his lyrical, poetic language, German born W. G. Sebald reminds me of the Nobel prize winning French author Patrick Modiano. Mr. Sebald blends fact and fiction in his tale of an unnamed narrator meeting and befriending a historian of European architecture by the name of Jacques Austerlitz. Also included are more than six dozen photographs along with a number of illustrations and charts.

The more we come to know Austerlitz in his recounting of his past, how he arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee, age four, from Nazi infested Czechoslovakia, how he was adopted and raised by an older Welsh minister and his wife, how, as an adult, he returned to Prague and located a close friend of his vanished mother and father, how he then further traced the fate of his parents, the more our hearts open not only to Austerlitz and his family but all the many men and women and children who suffered the brutality and madness of the Nazis.

I suspect one reason Mr. Sebald included the many black and white photographs as part of his novel goes back to what art critic Robert Hughes noted about the Holocaust: photography captured the ghastliness of the atrocities in a way other forms of art could not. In an attempt to retain the tone of this deeply moving literary work, I have included black and white photographs of my own choosing to accompany direct quotes from the novel.



"It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other. And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad."



"As it was, I recognized him by the rucksack of his, and for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago."



"After ninety seconds in which to defend yourself to a judge you could be condemned to death for a trifle, some offense barely worth mentioning, the merest contravention of the regulations in force, and then you would be hanged immediately in the execution room next to the law court, where there was an iron rail running along the ceiling down where the lifeless bodies where pushed a little further as required."



"Most of them were silent, some wept quietly, but outbursts of despair, loud shouting and fits of frenzied rage were not uncommon."



“The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”



"The longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

TOUTE LA MÉMOIRE DU MONDE


Il film “Austerlitz” è del 2015, con Denis Lavant nel ruolo del protagonista (l’attore feticcio di Leos Carax), diretto dal praghese Stan Neumann. Il film non ha circolato se non per qualche festival, il suo pubblico (ristretto) è stato confinato alla critica che lo ha definito U.M.O., nel senso di Unidentified Movie Object (gli U.F.O. sono unindentified Flying Object).

Di fronte a pagine monolitiche, prive di interruzioni e a capo, con periodi lunghi, ricerca del dettaglio e frequenti digressioni, ci si può perdere: ma non qui.
Le fotografie, bellissime, spezzano la lettura: e più ci si avvicina alla fine e più sembra che aumentino e compaiano anche le prime interruzioni, i primi spazi bianchi: proprio quando il libro sta per finire, e io non lo volevo affatto lasciare, volevo che continuasse, senza sosta.
C’è ancora tanta memoria del mondo che Sebald può raccontare.

O forse no? È davvero tutta qui, come nel breve bellissimo documentario di Alain Resnais sulla Biblioteca Nazionale di Parigi, "Toute la mémoire du monde"?


Altra immagine tratta dall’U.M.O.

Gli articoli e commenti che ho letto su quest’opera insistono sulla ripetizione ossessiva della parola viaggio (Sebald ci porta di qua e di là per l’Europa, avanti e indietro nel tempo) e della domanda se si tratti di fiction o di non-fiction.
Il viaggio è essenzialmente temporale, un viaggio nella Storia, e soprattutto nella Memoria.
Per quanto riguarda l’altra questione, direi che questo libro è la quintessenza del romanzo, e che del genere ‘romanzo’ utilizza espedienti vari e ingegnosi: l’intreccio di materiali diversi (storia, riflessione filosofica, cronaca, fotografia, architettura, pittura, botanica, entomologia…), la ricerca-indagine, il cambiamento dei punti di vista (costantemente due, il narratore e Austerlitz, e di quando in quando, ne entra un terzo, Vera sopra tutti, ma anche altri testimoni/commentatori/portatori di informazioni che Austerlitz più o meno casualmente incontra e incrocia), le scatole cinesi, il racconto nel racconto… al punto che io per tutto il tempo della lettura ho avuto in mente film (“F For Fake” di Welles, “L'hypothèse du tableau volé”, e sempre di Ruiz, “Les trois couronnes du matelot” con quella incredibile fotografia di Sacha Vierny che da sola genera immagini e atmosfera e attesa) e Cortazar e…


…mi imbattei in una fotografia di grande formato, raffigurante una stanza tutta caselle, dal pavimento al soffitto, in cui oggi vengono conservati i documenti dei prigionieri reclusi nella cosiddetta fortezza piccola di Terezín. [p.299-301]

Se Sebald è rintracciabile nel narratore, in tutto o in parte, se invece sia Austelitz, o un mix dei due, che cosa cambia? Se i fatti narrati sono accaduti veramente, se la ‘realtà’ entra in scena, non è più romanzo?
Come se la ‘realtà’ non avesse bisogno della letteratura per diventare verità….

Sebbene pubblicato nel 2001, è composto con scrittura di cento anni prima e atmosfere anche precedenti: contemporaneamente rimane figlio della fine del secondo millennio per costruzione narrativa e uso delle magnifiche fotografie.


…e qui, sull’altra fotografia, disse Věra dopo qualche istante, qui ci sei tu, Jacquot, nel febbraio del 1939, più o meno sei mesi prima della tua partenza da Praga. Avevi avuto il permesso di accompagnare Agáta a un ballo in maschera in casa di uno dei suoi influenti ammiratori e, apposta per l’occasione, ti confezionarono questo costume tutto bianco. Jacquot Austerlitz, páže růžové královny, è scritto sul retro per manod i tuo nonno, che proprio in quei giorni era in visita da noi. [p.197-198]

Io sono stato rapito da subito, dalle descrizioni e divagazioni architettoniche, che con me trovano terreno fertile e lettore interessato, pronto a riconoscere la bellezza delle parole e dei mattoni, delle fortezze militari e delle stazioni e delle banche, di tutte le 'cattedrali' che il capitalismo ha dedicato alla propria glorificazione.
Ma le fortezze che sembravano inespugnabili sono diventate inutili nel giro di pochi decenni, quando nuove armi e nuove tattiche d’assedio le hanno superate: quello che doveva essere perfezione (del lavoro, della razionalità, della durata…), risulta presto molto imperfetto, cattedrale nel deserto.
Così come, spingendo all’eccesso il paragone (operazione che mi fa venire i brividi), come tutta la perfezione tecnica, l’azione degli ‘specialisti’ nazisti nello spianare la strada alla razza ariana e a un mondo ‘liberato’ da impuri, ha causato orrori e sfracelli, ma si è dissolta nella sua stessa perversa finta logica, nella stessa maniacalità perfezionista.


…e continuo a guardare quel viso nel contempo estraneo e familiare, disse Austerlitz, faccio scorrere all’indietro la pellicola, volta per volta, e vedo l’indicatore del tempo nell’angolo a sinistra in alto dello schermo, i numeri che le nascondono in parte la fronte, i minuti e i secondi, da 10:53 a 10:57, e i centesimi di secondo, che girano talmente in fretta da non poter essere né decifrati né trattenuti. [p.267-268]

Austerlitz si muove per l’Europa e nella sua memoria: racconta con parole cariche di malinconia e angoscia, parla al narratore, ma è un lungo monologo che sembra ininterrotto, non interrotto né dall’ascoltatore né dal tempo.
Sta parlando a se stesso? È da qui che proviene il senso di straniamento?

È Sebald o Austerlitz che teme le parole non siano sufficienti e rimangano traballanti senza il puntello, senza la ‘verità’, delle fotografie?

In realtà, anche le immagini sono un magnifico raffinato artificio letterario. In fondo, ai replicanti di ‘Blade Runner’ venivano fornite proprio fotografie per costruire una loro memoria personale e privata, basata sulla finzione, sull’artificio. E le prime foto nel libro sono di occhi, occhi di uccelli (rapaci notturni) e occhi di uomini: occhi che fissano il lettore, occhi che forse guardano le altre foto dell’opera per cercare la memoria perduta, per cercare un’identità dimenticata e quindi sconosciuta, e alla fine forse per trovare solo amnesia.
Austerlitz crede di riconoscere la madre che ha perduto e dimenticato e poi improvvisamente, e apparentemente, scoperto e ritrovato, crede di riconoscerla in un fotogramma. Ma ha bisogno della memoria, della conoscenza, degli occhi di Věra per capire che è un’illusione, sua madre non è quella, non è in quell’immagine.


…e lì fra le lettere, cartelle personali, programmi di sala e ritagli di giornale ingialliti, mi sono imbattuto nella fotografia, priva di indicazioni, di un’attrice la quale pareva coincidere con il ricordo offuscato che avevo di mia madre… [p.269]

Dov’è, allora, la verità? Nella stanza tutta caselle, dal pavimento al soffitto, dove oggi sono conservati i documenti di tutti quelli reclusi e scomparsi a Terezín?

Libro magnifico.
Magnifico e azzecatissimo regalo di un’amica.
Opera ardita, che si spinge in alto, come la torre di Babele: e forse proprio questo ha determinato il caos e l’inconcludenza di questo mio commento.


Immagine che non viene da Austerlitz, ma come sempre una persona fotografata di spalle si carica di mistero e suspense. Mistero e suspense di cui il romanzo di Sebald è pregno.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s something reminiscent of an archaeological dig about Austerlitz – the quest to piece back together a missing life by sifting through layers of the past. The finds often appearing random and impenetrable until eventually a cypher is discovered.

Austerlitz reads like the autobiography of an academic, recounted in instalments to the stranger he repeatedly meets in various locations, who has lived a hermetic and fruitless life. You’re never quite sure if you’re reading biography or fiction, a puzzle enhanced by the inclusion of many photographs purporting to be a documentation of Austerlitz’s life. We soon learn that he has always shied away from the knowledge of who he really is, that he was sent on a Kindertransport by his mother when the Nazis invaded Prague where he lived as a child. Very late in life he sets about trying to discover what happened to his mother and father.

It’s no coincidence that Austerlitz shares his name with a train station as train stations are a constant conduit for transition and connection - and ever present is the towering menace they can evoke in the light of the holocaust. The best parts of this novel are always when he explores the relationship of buildings to history, when he confronts the ghosts that haunt buildings. There’s a brilliant indictment of the horrible new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris which we discover was formerly the site of the warehouses where the Nazis stored looted treasure from the Parisian Jews. Also moving is when he visits the concentration camp at Theresienstadt where his mother was interned and even more so when he acquires a copy of the Nazi propaganda film of the ghetto and slows it down in the hope of catching a glimpse of his mother’s face among all the Jewish prisoners forced to act out a grotesque charade of wellbeing. In the slowed down version the upbeat music of the soundtrack becomes an insufferable mournful dirge.

Translated from German, the voice is deadpan, weathered, almost monotonous and no doubt might alienate some readers. I can’t say it was a prose style that enamoured me much.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first came across the writings of W.G. Sebald by complete accident, wandering in a bookstore I accidentally caught the edge of a table and sent three or four books hurtling to the floor, one was Sebald's 'Vertgo' a book that was unfamiliar to me, but one that caught my attention. Although it didn't set the world on fire for me in ways I had hoped for, it was no doubt the work of a true ingenious writer who pushed the boundaries of fiction into new territory. Within just three pages of reading 'Austerlitz', and faced with four sets of eyes starring at me (including an owl and a philosopher), I lingered for a while starring right back at them, and felt this work would be different, in a good way, and go on to fulfil my expectations, and it did to a degree. For the most part Sebald's narrative cast a hypnotic spell over me. I was awestruck, glued to the pages, and filled with a deep sensation that I can't quite put my finger on. Not many other writers have left me feeling this way. And yet, by it's conclusion, I still couldn't help feeling more like a glass of water half empty rather than one half full. I felt something special building in it's last third, only to feel the novel fizzle out somewhat, knocking back it's lasting impression.

Austerlitz is in many ways so close to being a literary tour-de-force, using the language of extended and ostensibly inconsequential melancholy to describe the life of Jacques Austerlitz whom he (Sebald we presume) first meets in the railway station in Antwerp studying the architecture of its waiting room. It is hard to tell just how much of the narrative, if any, is true, although it reads precisely like it was. Regardless, it's remarkably done. Added throughout are grey out-of-focus photographs of people and places, which lend it veracity. The hero of the book, or more properly the anti-hero since he essentially does nothing especially useful with his life, was born in Prague, the son of a moderately successful opera singer and the manager of a small slipper-making factory who was also active in left-wing politics. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the subsequent German invasion of Czechoslovakia meant that his father had to flee to Paris, never to be seen or heard from again, his letters to his family confiscated by the German authorities. His mother managed to arrange for her son to be sent on a Kindertransport to London. He was adopted by a Nonconformist preacher and his wife, near Bala in North Wales. By way of long, gloomy, maundering accounts of his life which sometimes have the character of shaggy dog stories, the narrator builds up a sense of his persona which is essentially a deeply melancholy one, bereft of any friendships, or a sense that he truly belongs in this world.

So, what are we to make of all of this? in a ways the account is emblematic of many ostensibly ineffectual lives, of an academic intelligence wasted in a grandiose intellectual project that requires years of taking notes but never leads to the grand book that should have resulted from it, until the narrator decides to burn all the accumulation of material in a small bonfire in the garden of his terrace house. But, at the same time and in a way that is highly distinctive, the book provides a strangely transcendent and hypnotic sense of the power of history, and of the relationship between an individual and the accidents of their life. I thought the Holocaust may feature more heavily, but it only makes up a small proportion of the book, although when it does go into details it's a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis. Austerlitz fails to make sense of his brutalised young self while wandering round the concentration camp at Terezen, where his mother was confined, which causes him to break down when he later remembers what happened. The book shimmers with something akin to menace. We are starting to become aware that Austerlitz is carrying around a terrible secret. The drama of his life, however, is that he does not know what that secret is. He is a man burdened by memories that he does not possess. But little by little, sheer chance cracks the carapace and the memories come flooding back.

Sebald's use of the old, and architectural detail, biography and travelogue, is quite brilliant, and generally his characters are totally fixated by histories, and by that especially of 19th-century Europe, for the lessons it carries about how apparent rationalism can turn monstrous. In this, as in the book's use of flashbacks, ominous journeys and panoramic descriptions, there are the faint echoes of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. And for all the uniquely lulling rhythm of Sebald's sentences and the trademark eerie precision of his language - his Antwerp fort has limbs and claws - other influences, too, begin to suggest themselves. The sense here of people being dwarfed and oppressed by systems is familiar from Kafka and Foucault: even the libraries where the narrators loiter are depicted as infinitely oppressive institutions. At it's heart though, it's simply a story about a life, Sebald includes passages with the rawness of a rare, good memoir, and the momentum of a rarer still convincing historical epic. There is even a wide-screen battle scene, as Austerlitz listens to his boarding-school history teacher recount the Napoleonic War confrontation of the same name: "The Russian and Austrian troops had come down from the mountain sides like a slow avalanche... I see cannonballs suspended for an eternity in the air... victims flinging up"

There were moments that were extraordinarily affecting, and the haunting meandering journey through time, place, and even genre makes me feel so glad to have read this. It is no doubt a unique book by a writer who stood out from the crowd. And it saddens me to think of all the future work Sebald never got to produce. Had he been around today, then I am sure he would have been a Nobel recipient by now.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first sight, this book seems like an endless succession of distant observations, a long chain of purely visual descriptions by the author himself (at least if we assume the narrator is Sebald) and especially by his somewhat mysterious friend Jacques Austerlitz. I know this does not seem very attractive, and it is also strengthened by the monotonous and slow narrative style that is sustained throughout the story. I can understand that many people slam this book after a number of pages.

But at the same time the narrative style is just what makes it stand out! You can compare it with the style of Marcel Proust: long meandering sentences with an accumulation of details and also very visually descriptive. As in his previous novels Sebald has inserted dozens of rather vague, black and white photographs to emphasize the realistic nature of the narrative, but with the paradoxal effect that they add uncertainty. And then there’s the continuous use of the indirect speech: on almost every page Sebald mentions "said Austerlitz", and in the second third of the book there even is a double indirect speech, "said Vera, said Austerlitz" , as he recounts what Austerlitz’ former nanny has told Austerlitz about his past. This repeated indirect speech strengthens the mesmerizing, hypnotic effect of the story, as if you were walking in the dead of the night, before sunrise, in a half waking state of mind. I suspect that Sebald thus consciously intended to reach the effect of timelessness.

And this brings us to the meta-fictional layer of this book: to me, it is essentially about time, and how we as individuals are in or out of time, are struggling with time, not getting a grip on it and also not able to get away from it. That, in a nutshell is the tragedy of the story of Jacques Austerlitz: this isolated, hyper introverted man, the observer of the outside of things (in the beginning of the book he talks incessantly about the architecture and construction history of what he sees around him), this man initially seems to live outside of time; but through his prolonged narrative he shows that – to his horror – he has discovered that he is inextricably linked to a very grave episode of human history, namely the Holocaust. This discovery is recounted through a process of slowly scraping his memory, like an archaeologist does, until he comes to the point where he is confronted with what he apparently has suppressed all his life (so there is quite a lot of Freud in this book too).

Downright masterful it is, the way Sebald brings this story. The timelessness that is suggested by the writing style culminates in one long sentence of nine pages, in which the inhuman machinery of the concentration camp/ghetto Theresienstadt is brought to life, seemingly contained and detached but gruesome to the bone.

“Austerlitz” for me definitely is one of the masterpieces of recent literature, although you'ld better read it when you are in a contemplative state of mind. It is truly tragic that W. G. Sebald was killed in a traffic accident a few months after finishing this book.

PS. It’s a bonus for the Flemish/Belgian reader that the book begins and ends in the Central Station of Antwerp and the Nazi prison camp of Breendonk, which also illustrates the ingenious mirror game that Sebald has included in this story.

[©hrissie ❁ · Rating 5 out of 5]

How many WWII novels have been written, published, read? Too many, perhaps? And yet none – I repeat – none possess the full crushing force of Austerlitz, paradoxically a (post-)WWII novel in reverse mode. Or the novelistic version of the film Memento, with Proustian underpinnings.

Austerlitz is the narrative rendition of a backwards, tormented, and obsessive search for one’s history. ‘What does it mean?’ for Austerlitz to be named thus, as opposed to what he thought his name had been, Elias, until his early teens? Who are his people, and where does he come from? Severed from his family and transported to Wales at the tender age of just over four years, Jacques Austerlitz enters adulthood with a blank slate where there ought to be memories of lived experience, and grows up to be a sombre, isolated, and detached scholar, whose mere sense of belonging wholly depends on his books and love for learning.

This is a tale that narrates the trauma of one’s own historylessness; a story buried beneath layers and layers of oblivion that must be brought back – excruciatingly – to the surface, recovered from the dungeons and underworld of historical atrocity. It is no coincidence that Austerlitz recalls Auschwitz, the emblem of human extinction as perpetuated by history itself. In this novel, Austerlitz sets out on a Joycean journey of self-recovery, as he indefatigably endeavours to retrace long-repressed steps, and painfully endure – reconstruct, and relay – the re-emergence of memory.

The narrative itself is contained – impressively – within the parameters of one uninterrupted paragraph, in which the Sebald-like narrator meticulously – and irresistibly, I would say – recounts Austerlitz’s story as the latter himself related it to him during their chance encounters between 1967 and 1997. The phrase ‘said Austerlitz’ and its equivalents recur on every page, in a formal recovery – and re-envisioning – of Bernhardian syntax, also manifested through Sebald’s aptitude for long, ravishing, asphyxiating sentences. The seamless flow of the narrative is solely punctuated by an assortment of photographs, images, and mementos that are really and truly an extension of the narrative itself, and reinforce the vision of all-encompassing death and oblivion. Because the very fact that a photograph ‘immortalises’ a person or a thing both conceals and reveals the finitude of its real counterpart. In fact, images – in words and photographs – of decay, dust, desolation, and death, abound. As does the recurring sense of ‘sinking into’ and ‘being swallowed up’, cast into irreversible oblivion – the shrinking, as it were, of images and people. Also, the blurred borders between life and death, sinisterly echoing and echoed by the seeming multidimensionality and permutations of spaces: historical wrongs – and graveyards – pulsating, though buried, beneath architectural grandeur; or permanently enduring, in the barren, vibrating quietness of the camps and memorials.

Also uninterrupted is the heartache for the waste of it all: for the human reduction to nothing. This is precisely what makes Sebald’s novel an important one. Monumental, in many respects. Because it is defined by this nothingness, by the trauma of obliteration, and forcefully seeks to counteract it, in a torturous movement that makes for a very fragile and delicate narration, structured around the human’s instinctive search for meaning while having to navigate through nothingness and the incomprehensible at every turn. Indeed, Austerlitz becomes increasingly aware of his own ‘avoidance system’ – his survival instinct, but also that which resists remembrance – and must agonisingly tear it down via the mode of self-displacement: transferring himself to the desolate post-war landscapes, and connecting fragments of memories. His narrative constantly picks up on a sense of imperceptible vastness and immensity, as it gives way to and is overwhelmed by a stream of muddled-and-morose memories, ‘lapsing, as so often, into deep abstraction’.

Sebald’s writing exhibits a pronounced Proustian sensibility that adds to the contemplative quality of the narration and informs its conception of time, memory, and recollection. It delves into the lacuna and inarticulacy of (historical) time as experienced by the human mind, and filters its grasp on reality through sense-perceptions. Tangible things and sites acquire a life of their own – a life of meaning. The rucksack, for instance, that Austerlitz carries along with him ever since he can remember. Or a sense of the uncannily familiar – the half-conscious remembrance – evoked by a feeling in the air, by the openness and seeming infinitude of landscapes, by the impenetrable, and – equally – by the most ordinary of objects and places. Photographs, or Museum tickets, for instance.

Ultimately, Austerlitz is a personal, heart-rending, intimate story of one man’s life-struggle with unrelenting trauma, the poignant and persisting effects of which reveal themselves endlessly. Austerlitz is unable to engage with fellow human beings, and suffers from hysterical epilepsy, as the devastating realities of his past come back to haunt him. It is about telling – or exorcising – the death that is inside him, as well as the harrowing Death(s) of the holocaust. In this respect, this is a very 21st century novel: this is us, profoundly dissociated from a history that is ours: a history of Today, once more, yet again. War prevailing, ruthlessly terminating lives, as if they do not matter to those losing them.

This novel – it is also worth noting – is a work of great erudition that is almost encyclopaedic at times, reflecting Austerlitz and the narrator’s – therefore, Sebald’s – keen passion for knowledge and scholarly study. The pace certainly suffers from this, but the love and power instilled in these passages is such that they considerably enhance the reading experience, and Sebald no doubt intended for them to add substantial layering to his narrative.

Readers of historical fiction and good literary fiction that stands the test of time – or rather, immortalises the fading contours of our very own history or historical consciousness – must read this novel. At the end of which – mark my words – you will be a different person to the one you thought you were, before reading this.

Austerlitz has a distinctive hallucinatory feel about it, its seeping, overflowing pain making it both subdued and unforgettably compelling. You feel this narrative – its undercurrent of the most inextinguishable emotions of humankind – more so than reading it.

A tribute to the remembrance of things past (and ominously present).🥀

5 stars. Unquestionably so.


Quotes

‘And yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.’

‘We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.’

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Austerlitz fascinated me, but I couldn't say I loved it. Reading this book gave me the feeling of being jet-lagged somewhere in a strange city at three o'clock in the morning, having strange revelations that would seem bizarre in the daylight. Not a feeling I dislike, by any means. Sebald's attempts to find a prose style to match his explorations of memory and loss are beautiful and haunting, but for me at least the effect was more soporific than exhilarating. Maybe ‘hypnotic’ is a better word. The sentences ramble carefully, the sense reaching you faintly through a multiple-framing effect whereby the story is told by Jacques Austerlitz, to our distant, Sebaldesque narrator, meaning the sentences have a characteristic double-tagging device for reported speech which gives them a steady, sleepy rhythm:

Can't you tell me the reason, she asked, said Austerlitz…
Sometimes, so Lemoine told me, said Austerlitz…

One sentence near the end sprawls across eight or nine pages, the clauses fading in and out of each other dreamily, like an interesting train of thought that goes through your mind just before you drop off to sleep. The number of paragraph breaks in the whole book can be counted on one hand. All this is in the service of recreating the effects of memory, as Sebald sees it: its unreliability, its fluidity compared to the rigid unchangeability of actual past events.

Especially past tragedy. Because what Austerlitz is remembering is something he has spent his life trying to repress: his early childhood as part of a Jewish family in Prague in the 1930s. Hence, his meditations on architecture or natural history in the early part of the book all seem to be skirting round something else, as yet unnamed; and when finally he begins to trace the fate of his parents, there is a series of complex and rewarding thematic call-backs which tie the novel together very beautifully: an illustration seen in a Welsh children's Bible, for instance, of Israelites camped out in the desert, is echoed later by a description of a Nazi encampment in central Europe. Austerlitz's own name seems to be working hard, with its associations of war; and indeed it's only a few central letters away from the most infamous Holocaust site of all – one that's never mentioned in this book but which can be intimated from comments about family members ‘sent east’.

This is not a ‘Holocaust novel’ in the usual sense, though – its real subject is not exactly what happened in the middle of the last century, but rather how Europe can and should remember it (Europe as a whole – this is a novel that deliberately ranges over cities, and languages, from across the whole continent). The vital importance of remembering, and also the complete futility of trying. And the futility also of expressing what we feel about it, because for Sebald language is always at best a poor approximation of reality, ‘something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us’. I disagree with this assessment, and I think Sebald's novel is in itself a weighty counter-argument. But nevertheless it's a very moving thesis written with a great deal of artistry, and if I felt more admiration than affection for it, that's perhaps just because I read it in a state of cold wonder at what he was managing to describe – ‘a kind of wonder,’ as Sebald says elsewhere, ‘which is in itself a form of dawning horror.’

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

”It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last… And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?”

I have trouble writing about Sebald. I read The Emigrants and The Rings Of Saturn back-to-back a few years ago, and didn’t bother writing reviews on this site. I just added them to my favorites and gave the requisite 5 stars. Perhaps this silence that comes after reading Sebald is in some ways my attempt to not trivialize or minimize the effect reading his books produces; on the other hand, it might be that Sebald says what needs to be said, in just the way it has to be said; that it is difficult to follow Sebald because there is a certain emotional dusk or twilight that his prose produces that then inevitably calls forth a kind of night- one wants to silently dwell on the words and images, because they seem so fragile, almost sacred. I’m not hyperbolizing this experience. Sebald is, to me, the inheritor and refiner, perhaps the perfector, of not only the whole body of 20th century literature of exile, but also one of the last great rememberers, the conscience that carries the lessons of the disasters of the 20th century. He represents the dying flame of Old World European literary scholars- a Sir Thomas Browne roaming the post-Relativity age. The trance-like or oneiric quality of his prose seems to me the voice of Time, but Time evacuating itself of its properties- time falling into the inner place where it dissolves within ourselves as Memory. His prose captures the essence of experience in the process of always being lost and recovered, the tenses of our lives that are always flickering into substance and de-substantiating before we might grab hold and define them.

This is a personal and a universal achievement. For all of his books are in some way about collective disappearance and the attempts we make, the various means and tactics we as individuals employ, to keep oblivion at bay. They are about how universal experience weaves the fate of the individual (thus the recurring themes of historical consequence, war, colonialism, etc.) In this sense, Austerlitz is a pinnacle of Sebaldean prose, as it directly confronts, through a single person, the universal history of destruction. Its main concern is the possibility of the universal forgetting of the lessons of the Holocaust to the obliterating work of Time and the caprice of Memory within the individual. This book is populated with ghosts, wavering beings, mists, fogs, smoke, things that obscure, grand facades of buildings housing empty labyrinths, vacant wind-sung streets, gloaming forests, cemeteries overgrown with time’s lichen and tendrils, processions of those diminished by death suddenly appearing, glimmering into and retreating out of this world. The prose, of course, wanders, walks, explores- Sebald is pretty much only digression, in all of his books- beautiful, melancholy digression- akin to the process of meditative reflection itself the prose drifts, associates, follows leads down desolate halls, disappears into dusty vaults, peers through windows at empty landscapes in winter light, watches the clouds above silently pass away. But in all of this an utterly human voice is rising and ebbing, revealing, guiding, a tenderness pervades the melancholy (and, to me, the word melancholy almost always implies something achingly beautiful and tender as well as something struck with sadness and loss). A reach for the eternal and Ideal within the irretrievable. So Austerlitz, and Sebald, comes to find that place where hopeless hopes invest the human experience.

But really, this “review” is simply an excuse to provide some links to a few Lieder ohne Worte- throughout my reading of Austerlitz this was the music floating through mind:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR3t6v...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV2LRF...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-n_wb...

and of course

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKtkHh...

[Lala BooksandLala · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this to experience the "10 Best Books of the Century" as per the New York Times.

Austerlitz is a character we meet who doesn't remember his past, and goes on a journey (through the eyes of our unnamed narrator) to understand his and his parents' history. It covers the horrors of the holocaust, their traumatic separation, and we watch Austerlitz navigate these repressed memories and be confronted with new information. It's very dense without much reprieve with dialogue or chapter breaks, and I would most recommend it most to people who already know they enjoy that style, not necessarily for anyone just trying to get into literary fiction.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do we (re-)construct the past, and how does memory shape us? In this novel, Sebald discusses many aspects of personal memory and the re-telling of history as a cultural and culturally shaped technique, themes that are also central in the scientific works of Jan and Aleida Assmann who just yesterday received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. I think it's very telling that experts on cultural memory receive a PEACE prize, as the way we face, frame and remember our personal and the historical past - especially the violent part of it - is instructive for our behavior and self-definition in the present. Austerlitz tackles this topic in a fictional manner.

Jacques Austerlitz is a retired scholar living London. He only found out his real name when he graduated high school, as he came to England alone at age 4 with a "Kindertransport", fleeing from the Nazis. Now, at 56, mentally troubled Austerlitz tries to find the source of his inner turmoil by researching his past, thus putting together a moasic of his life. Phsycial objects connected to the past have a special significance throughout the book: Austerlitz is an expert for the history of architecture, meaning that his objects of study are the physical manifestation of times past, landmarks that reflect history. While memory is fluid, buildings persist and accumulate the signs of passing time on their surfaces, and so do many other objects he finds and discusses.

Sebald chose a striking narrative form with very long sentences that are reminiscent of a stream-of-consciousness technique, but reflect how the narrator of the text tells the readers the story he himself was told by Austerlitz (so we are dealing with a story within a story about a story being re-assembled) - and surprisingly, the result is very readable, because the sentences are tightly structured. As a consequence of aforementioned aesthetic, there are no chapters, but the text is interspersed with maps and photographs, which are in turn often discussed in the story. By that, Sebald is repeatedly pointing at the problem of documentation, how to make sense of the past and how to incorporate history - global as well as personal history - into one's own life story.

Sebald remixed several real stories and images in order to create the book, so there is indeed an aspect of documentation here (e.g., he had a troubled colleague who taught history of architecture in London and tried to find out about his family late in life - the photo of the child on the cover is an authentic picture of this colleague). The whole book is a puzzle questioning the way we are constructing our place in the world - very impressive.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz is an austere but beautiful narrative within a narrative about identity and loss with the Holocaust as a looming backdrop. The narrator (unnamed) records conversations with Joseph (Jacques) Austerlitz whom he meets a few times by chance and later at the whim of Austerlitz. This secondary narrator talks about his life before discovering his origins and the incredible quest across the Czech Republic, Germany, and France to find memories of his mother and father. There were moments that were soul-crushing but also moments of great Proustian beauty. Containing no chapters or paragraph indentations and just three breaks that I recall demarcated by asterisks, it is hard to interrupt oneself during reading it.
A few quotes I enjoyed:
"...they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expressions as the creatures in the zoo." Page 6
"...we even seemed to hear the heavy calvary clashing, and felt (like a weakness sensed in our own bodies) whole ranks of men collapsing beneath the surge of oncoming force." Page 100
"In doing this job, which in its pointlessness reminded me of the eternal punishments that we are told...we must endure after death..." Page 188
"...I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something different, something inexpressible because we have no word for it, just as I had no words when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand." Page 193-4
"At some point in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life." Page 298
"...I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and a absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed must ultimately coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability." Page 393
"Jacobson writes that it was truly terrifying to see such emptiness open up a foot away from firm ground, to realize that there was no transition, only this dividing line, with ordinary life on one side and its unimaginable opposite on the other." Page 414

Reading the text in Austerlitz and seeing the photos are haunting, but necessary to fully appreciate the beauty and pathos of this essential work about the 20th C'a greatest catastrophe.

[Emmanuel Kostakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What was it that so darkened our world?”

Jacques Austerlitz an enigmatic academic at an institute of art in London tries to unthread the story of his life. Fragments of memories intercalate with the physical space that surrounds him making it part of his existence. The unhappiness building up inside him destroys his faith just when he needs it the most. Jacques Austerlitz is a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical thinking as inextricably as to his confused emotions; like an archaic dramatic persona throws himself into a “gloomy and inimical” journey of self-discovery through the Symplegades of past and presence.

“…space contains all the hours of my past life, all the supressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entrained.”

Austerlitz will transport you to the depths of human soul. This is a compelling narrative into time and reality that brilliantly encapsulates the depths of the ephemera and the apogee of the eternal in postmodern fiction. Memory and presence converge into an abstract reality. The scintillating photographs spread throughout the novel give a harrowing approach to the emotionally charged storyline. Sebald’s writing is fresh and seductive, with a unique attitude to immerse you into the limelight of humanity and deconstruct your deepest fears into simple factual realities. A song that never ends…

“It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the leaving and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”

Highly recommended…
4.75/5

[Jola · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beauty of Austerlitz (2001) is so intense that I had to take breaks while reading it. It was not difficult because almost all the suspense had been killed for me by the thorough summary of the plotline in the introduction by James Wood. Reading prefaces is risky, as it seems. I realize that the plot is not the core of this book but it felt awkward to know exactly what was going to happen. Besides, I would have preferred to compare my own interpretations to James Wood’s, not having his ideas imprinted in my mind from page one.

At first sight, Austerlitz is a story of a man who looks for traces of his lost family and struggles to reconstruct his past. I think it would be easier to enumerate the things this book is not than enlist what it is: a Holocaust testimony, a philosophical treaty on time, an essay on architecture, language, photography, nature and travelling, a fictional biography, a psychological study, a Bildungsroman, a historical fiction, an adoption story, to name just a few. The way the photos converse with the text is astonishing and the fact that they are fictional makes me admire W.G. Sebald’s creativity even more.

As for the protagonist’s surname, I agree with James Wood’s analysis (the battle of Austerlitz --> Auschwitz) but I also thought the fact that Jacques's family name begins with an A and ends with a Z might suggest that the character’s experiences are a summa of many, many others. Austerlitz is akin to Everyman.

When I was reading this novel, I could not stop thinking about the medieval legend of Jew the Eternal Wanderer. Jacques Austerlitz reminded me of the wandering Jew but contrary to Ahasver he was completely innocent. Never at home, always a lonely stranger and foreigner, constantly on the road... On the railroad, to be exact.

The book was so powerful that I expected a more impressive ending. Besides, the credibility of some events felt questionable – I mean the accidental meetings all over Europe. Notwithstanding, this book blew me away. As usual, there is some cost to it. Everything I am reading at the moment seems so bland, so lacklustre compared to Austerlitz.

For me, Austerlitz is the quintessence of my ideal book. An intellectual adventure and an emotional earthquake at the same time. I adore the author's sublime and unobtrusive use of symbols, especially water. The clarity and elegance of his writing style, particularly while discussing complex philosophical topics like the perception of time, were breathtaking also.

W.G. Sebald makes me like the things I usually hate, for instance, battle scenes. The reason why I detest them is not only violence but also my traumatic memories from Tolstoy's War and Peace: the military descriptions there were torturous. But the battle scene à la Sebald was riveting. And his nature descriptions, especially the ones starring light! Just an example: On bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a lustre lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely—I remember this well—it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity. How I wish I could seep into this landscape and dissolve in it. A lustre lay covers not only Barmouth Bay but Austerlitz too. Immersion in this glow, an iridescent veil of pale, cloudy milkiness, is one of the most stunning things that have happened to me lately.


Landscape with a Wanderer by Eugeniusz Żak, 1916.

[Georgia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books are to be remembered. Not the who or why or when type remember but remember that is more like a fog. Sea fog. It wants land and makes the ferry late. It chills you as you watch the vanishing dock. You get through it but don't ever forget. That is W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. Read it and say after me, I was there.

[Emilio Berra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un'animata solitudine
Può contenere spoiler
Sebald è considerato forse il miglior scrittore tedesco degli ultimi decenni.
Dopo aver letto il piacevole breve testo "Il passeggiatore solitario", belle pagine sulle tracce di un altro grande, R. Walser, m'attendevo qualcosa di diverso da questo libro, "Austerlitz", salutato dai critici come autentico capolavoro, il cui protagonista è un docente di Storia dell'Architettura, studioso solitario spesso in viaggio per l'Europa, visitatore di luoghi particolari e, benché non in primo piano, alla ricerca delle proprie misteriose origini.
Qui non ho trovato quella lievità di scrittura che immaginavo, bensì una prosa densa e corposa che procede come come un fiume in piena, con ampio periodare e lunghe frasi che si concatenano in un fluire compatto : 315 pagine con un solo 'punto a capo', fortunatamente corredate da bellissime fotografie in bianco e nero pertinenti al testo.

Questo libro sfavillante di cultura ci regala anche alcune brevi e fulminanti immagini di personaggi famosi : Schumann salvato "nelle acque gelide del Reno" ; oppure Casanova ormai vecchio e canuto bibliotecario nel castello di Dux tra uno sfarfallio di libri.

La dimensione più congeniale al protagonista è quella austera e solitaria, in cui "prendere le distanze se qualcuno mi veniva troppo vicino" e non veder "altro intorno a me se non misteri e segni".
Una sala di lettura, "percorsa da leggeri mormorii, fruscii e colpetti di tosse", può parergli un luogo consono, con l'incerta sensazione di essere "sull'isola dei beati o, al contrario, in una colonia penale" . Oppure il cimitero, con "statue di angeli, perlopiù senza ali o comunque mutilate, che parevano impietrite proprio nell'atto di spiccare il volo" . E proprio a Parigi, su una tomba lungamente ricercata, scorge i nomi di due persone morte nel '44 ("morts en deportation"), dissolte "nell'aria grigia".

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sestina in a Train Station

You’ve just finished a novel called Austerlitz
About a man who feels he belongs nowhere
Brought up in a Welsh town by foster parents
Of his early life he has no memory
But strangely every time he boards a train
He is overcome by debilitating melancholy

It would already be melancholy
To live in Wales with the name Austerlitz
To have arrived there as a child by train
And to find yourself in the middle of nowhere
At an age so young that your memory
Cannot even hold onto its parents

Those who have lost their parents
Know the true meaning of melancholy
But at least most can rely on their memory
To bring fragments of them back—not Austerlitz
Early childhood recollections lead him nowhere
Like a destination without a train

So one day he decides to take a train
Back to the places that knew his parents
Places which no longer feel like nowhere
Where the architecture of melancholy
Echoes the footsteps of an Austerlitz
Searching through the lost & found of memory

He embarks on a giant game of memory
And each card he turns over sets a train
Of thought running deep into Austerlitz’s
Past and little by little his parents
Appear in a mist of melancholy
—They were living and now they are nowhere

When you shut the book at last you think nowhere
Have I read such reflections on memory
And you can’t help but feel melancholy
As you get ready to climb into a train
To spend a sunny weekend at your parents’
And you think why am I crying in the Gare d’Austerlitz?

If the memory of your parents
Puts you on a train to Melancholy
Then Austerlitz is bound to take you somewhere



https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...

[Argos · Rating 5 out of 5]

E.G.Sebald her eserinde beni şaşırtmaya devam ediyor. Asla kendini tekrarlamıyor. Bu kez 4 paragraflık bir kurgu ile birbirine son derece yumuşak geçiş yapan upuzun cümlelerle öykülerini bir anlatıcı (kendisi ?) ağzından, bir romana ismini veren kahramanımız Austerlitz’in ağzından anlatıyor. Tabii kendi tanımıyla hiçbir hayvanlar ansiklopedisinde anlatılmayan özel bir hayvan türü olan “insanı” odağına alarak. Yazarın çocukluk travması olan savaşın yıkımını bu kez Austerlitz’in gözünden okuyoruz.

Anlatıcının (yazarın ?) 1900’lü yıların sonlarında Belçika Anvers garında Austerlitz ile karşılaşmasıyla başlayan yolculuğu Paris’te, Prag’ta, Londra’da, Galler’de devam edip gidiyor. Peki kim bu Austerlitz? Hayatını Gallerliler, İngilizler ve Fransızların arasında geçiren, yavaş yavaş kendini yal­nız bırakan, bunun farkına vardığında ise gerçek kökenini düşünen ve onlarca yıl sonra anılarını hatırlamaya çalışarak köklerini arayan, tecrit edilmişlik ve çaresizlik duygusu içinde olan entellektüel bir mimar Austerlitz. Araştırmakta olduğu “burjuva dönemi mi­marlık ve uygarlık tarihi” içinde kapitalist dönemin mimari üslubunu, kendini en çok cezaevlerinde, kalelerde, mahkeme, ope­ra ve tren garları, hastanelerde gösterdiğini saptayan, bu nedenle öyküsünde buraları önceleyen bir mimar.

Austerlitz’in müthiş gözlem gücü Sebald’ın betimlemeleriyle okumaya doyulmayacak tablolar yaratıyor. Kurmaca yönü yokmuş, sanki tüm yazılanlar gerçekmiş gibi okuyorsak kitabı bu Sebald’ın kalemini ne denli etkili kullandığını gösteriyor, tabii erken ölümü ile nice başka büyük eserlerden mahrum kaldığımızı düşünüp kahrolmamak elde değil. Ne Austerlitz adının ne anlama geldiğini, ne onun kökenini, ne de çocuk yaşta neden İngiltere’ye geldiğini anlatmayacağım. Okursanız bu güzel kitabın tadını kaçırmak istemem çünkü. Te­rezin'deki “Getto Müzesi” bölümüne geldiğinizde hala tadınız kalmışsa tabii...

Jacques Austerlitz yıllarca bastırmış olduğu, ama artık içinde tutamadığı ve çıkmasına izin verdiği “reddedilmişlik ve yok edilmişlik” duygusuyla baş edeme­mesini anlatırken, geçirdiği ruhsal bunalımın hastanede sonlanması hiç şaşırtıcı olmadı benim için, bunca yük nasıl taşınır ki ? Bazen bir müze, bazen bir hastane veya kütüphane, bazen bir kale bazen bir tren garı öykülere mekan olur, öyle güzel anlatılır ki bu mekanlar, öykünün önüne geçerler, bu edebiyat güzelliğini Sebald’da hep görüyoruz. Ayrıca çok emek gerektiren araştırmalarıyla geçmişin izlerini sürerek bugüne ders niteliğinde mesajlar bırakıyor, belleğimizi taze tutmaya gayret ediyor.

Savaş konulu eserlerde sadece Sebald’da gördüğüm bir özellik adil olmaktır. 2. Dünya Savaşının kirli yüzünü bir Alman olmasına rağmen tarafsızlıkla sergiliyor, kah Nazileri, kah müttefikleri, kah kapoları, Nazilerle işbirliği yapan işgal edilmiş ülkelerin halklarını, kendi halkını, bombalanan yerlerdeki örneğin İngiltere’de Coventry ile Almanya’da Hamburg’da yaşayan sivil halkı kendi “insanlık terazisinde” tartıyor.

Roman mı okudum, belgesel-anı kitabı mı bilmiyorum, bilmem de gerekmiyor, ancak uzun süre dilimden düşmeyecek sanırım, “dedi Austerlitz”.

Mutlaka okuyun, okutun.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.*****

”Standing on the ruins of history, standing both in and on top of history’s depository, Jacques Austerlitz is joined by his name to these ruins: and again, at the end of the book, as at the beginning, he threatens to become simply part of the rubble of history, a thing, a depository of facts and dates, not a human being.”

His name is Jacques Austerlitz. He did not grow up with that name. He grew up in Wales as the son of a Calvinist preacher/retired missionary and his timid, colorless wife. They called him Dafydd Elias. It was a relief when he escaped this dreary half-life of oppressive thoughts and a plodding existence, waiting patiently for an afterlife. When finally he was allowed to go to school, it was as if he’d escaped from a prison sentence. It was at school that he learned of his unusual name. It is a name that denotes a merging of cultures, Czechoslovankian and French. Are there clues in that?

He discovers that he arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. His life before he arrived in Britain is a blank canvas, as if, while he was carried across the ocean, his memories fled back to his homeland.

He goes to Oxford and discovers he is drawn to European architecture. He has a nervous breakdown. He knows he must return to Czechoslovakia and fill in the gaps of his missing life. He finds some clues that help unlock the hidden door in his own mind, allowing the language of his past life and the memories to start flooding into his brain. ”I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it.”

An unknown narrator tells us this story through a series of meetings he has with Austerlitz. They meet first in Antwerp and then in a cavalcade of European cities. It is as if they are drawn to each other and there is almost a supernatural need for this story to be told to the narrator so that he can share it with us. Each time they meet, Austerlitz picks up the thread of the story at the very moment he left it when they last parted. He weaves together sections of his life and introduces us to people he met along his journey to find himself.

There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes?

”It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come.” I once stepped into an old man’s house, and it was as if his front door had been a portal to 1942. In the world that he could control, the interior of his house, he made time stand still. I felt this moment of discombobulation as if, when I stepped out of his door and back into the real world, my era would be waiting in the distant future.

”Unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.” It freaks me out to contemplate the idea that a race of people can die out and that their language only survives in the feeble lexicon of a handful of parrots.

”I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain.” I’ve never had a nervous breakdown, but it is always one of those lingering concerns that, eventually, one day, my brain will rebel against me and say, enough is enough...I’m pulling the plug. One doesn’t know who he will be on the other side, or if he will ever recover who he was, or maybe it's best he doesn’t. It is a scary thought to think of the shattered remains of my brain, like a building that has been hit by a bomb.

I have, of course, dabbled with the idea of reading W. G. Sebald. Nobel committee members have stated that he would have eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had an untimely end, an inconvenient car crash, that left him dead at fifty-seven. I wonder if he had time to be incensed that the stories still left to be told in his head would forever be just a few jottings in a notebook and of course, there are all the stories that he hadn’t even discovered yet. Louis Erdrich is the one who gave me the two-handed push in the back to finally read him. She was on a trip through Ojibwe country, and at night, while stuck in some cheap motel being gently swayed by the passing semi trucks, she would read Austerlitz. I was riding along with her, reading the tale of her travel in her Books and Island book. She talked about the long, complex sentences in Austerlitz. There is one sentence that goes on for more than seven pages. That might even be more Faulkneresque than William Faulkner himself. She said she had to read sentences over and over again, but she didn’t see it as a burden.

I have a very good attention span and found it interesting (I actually chuckled a few times at finding myself caught out) to discover myself losing the thread of a sentence. I, too, had to go back and reread sentences, whole pages; sometimes I skipped back two or three pages to begin again. There is one point when I contemplated whether I was really smart enough to read this book, but I’m a stubborn man when it comes to books. As I read, there was a growing understanding that I simply must finish this book, not because it is challenging, but because this book is too important not to understand its story. I kept waiting for that familiar click in my head when my brain has made the adjustments to the writing style, but it never really happened. I’m not sure we are supposed to be comfortable with the complexity of the structure. I also felt the fluttering of butterflies in my stomach that told me that I had stumbled upon something special.

As I sit here at my computer writing this review, contemplating my reading experience, I have the strong urge to reread it. This time I will be completely zoned in, impervious to distractions, and grasp the nuance of every sentence the moment I read it (I do beguile myself). I want to brush away the feeling that I failed the book in some way. With that feeling, I also feel euphoric, like I’ve ventured into something unknown and came away a better person. New vistas may have opened up in my mind. What else can I deduce from all this other than that the book is a masterpiece?

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

175th book of 2020.

I exist only because my German grandmother and her brother were two of 35 children brought to England at the end of the Second World War on the Kindertransport by an English Red Cross Charity worker named Edith Snellgrove. For whatever reason, she fell in love with my grandmother and my great-uncle, and, though not formally, adopted them. My grandmother is still alive today, whom I see twice a week, though she suffers from dementia and schizophrenia and has no command of the German language anymore. My brother and I slightly resent the fact we were never taught German, or indeed any other language, as children. Edith Snellgrove spoke 9 languages fluently and though she taught my grandmother bits of French and Russian, she was never invested enough to learn properly. In fact, when I was a child, my grandmother went once a week to German classes, to try and hold onto her native language that was left in Germany when she was brought to a foreign country by, essentially, a stranger, and had to learn English. Her father, Friedhelm Jung, died in 1944 in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; he was stationed in Crimea as soon as the War broke out—he was already in prison in 1939, for refusing to give money to the Hitler Church. With me now, in my home, I have a box filled with photographs and even Friedhelm’s letters from Crimea that he sent to his wife, detailing, where he could, what it was like and how he was. These letters have mostly been translated by an old German teacher my grandmother met at a Quaker Meeting House. I could go on, but all this I hope to one day write into a novel, and this isn’t about my grandmother, but about Austerlitz.

Jacques Austerlitz is without a past. Of course, I don’t mean this literally. We all have pasts. One of my old professors used to talk about people, like good characters in novels, being like asteroids or stars in the sky, scorching traces behind them, burning history into space and time. Austerlitz has a trace behind him, but he recognises it is not a trace he associates with himself. In the same way, I look at the trace my grandmother has left behind her here in England, and I wonder if once she looked back and thought how unfamiliar her own life felt to her. That is what Austerlitz’s life seems to him. As I read the novel, I felt his character’s emptiness and alienation, the same feelings that arose out of Sebald’s other, brilliant, novel The Emigrants. His first novel, Vertigo, does not lack those feelings, though they are more rooted by the sense of, well, vertigo. And we do not have to look far to see the feelings of alienation, time and memory in The Rings of Saturn either. The scope in the other novels, however, are wider: there are multiple characters, multiple stories, fragments, sometimes almost fractal… But in Austerlitz, our vision is concentrated on this boy who was sent on the Kindertransport in 1939 by his parents to escape the persecution of the Jews, heading for his new Welsh parents. By the time our narrator meets Austerlitz, he meets a man who feels he has left the wrong trace behind him in the sky. As he says himself at one point in the novel, We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. Thus begins Austerlitz’s narrative, his quest; and really, it is the oldest quest we know, a quest for home.



Sebald’s choice of structure differs from what we are used to. Austerlitz’s narrative comprises most of the book; there are no speech marks, there are no conversations, per se, and the narrator ‘says’ nothing.. Though the narrator does have internal thoughts. Here is a beautiful observation he has on Austerlitz: I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. Instead, Austerlitz’s monologue is a reel, paragraphs running for thirty or forty pages at a time, sometimes sentences running for seven pages at a time, as Austerlitz reports his long, rambling story in Sebald’s famous, ethereal style. And, like with Sebald’s other novels, it is filled with photographs, randomly occurring, sometimes relating to the text and sometimes not. He is a grown man, describing his quest for his identity and his history, and most importantly, and concretely, his real parents. So, as with Sebald’s other novels, Austerlitz is about history, time, memory, self and heritage; he is a voice of the post-war world, a world that Sebald understood, would never be the same for literature. As the New York Times said, with Primo Levi, Sebald is the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”. And Susan Sontag said,

“Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”



As I said in my first pre-review, I believe Sebald to be one of the most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century. It saddens me greatly that he only managed to write four novels before his death at the age of 57, after suffering a brain aneurysm whilst driving; he died before his car swerved out of control and collided with an oncoming lorry, severely injuring his daughter, though thankfully she survived the crash. There is a brilliant interview that took place, if I remember rightly, just over a week before his death, with Michael Silverblatt which I highly recommend. In fact, Silverblatt is perhaps one of the best interviewers out there for writers and has many fantastic ones, especially his ones with David Foster Wallace.


Sebald—Photo from the New Yorker

I have come to the end of Sebald’s oeuvre then. Next year I plan to reread The Rings of Saturn, and then I’ll probably reread Vertigo and The Emigrants too. Then, before I know it, it’ll be time to return to Austerlitz’s narrative, which will just as moving and important as it was now, and in 20 years, 40 years, I believe it will stand the same. I think about Austerlitz when I take books from my grandmother's bookcase, old editions of Goethe and Hesse, written in German, a language she no longer understands. Her own language, in a way, lost. And I realise that where we come from, who we are, what defines us, how we create ourselves from our pasts, and what our pasts do to create us: these are things that never fade.

[Axl Oswaldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

2025/09

Months ago Jay and I were talking about books that mean a lot to us, books that, one way or another, had spoken to us at some point through our reading journey, and Austerlitz was brought up in our conversation. I was so curious as to why this book was so meaningful to him, but I didn't want to get into the thick of it without having read it first, so I bet Jay that I'd read it before he could finish The Portrait of a Lady (one of my favorite novels of all time that he had started around that time), an unfair bet, I must say, considering the length of both novels. Here we are nonetheless, having experienced one of the best 21st-century books I have read in my life.

You might already know that I used to be biased years ago when talking about contemporary books, but at this point, it could be insulting to say that they are not worth the time. Sebald proved me wrong. I'm certain that Austerlitz will not only become a classic in the distant future—it probably is already—considering its complex narrative and timeless topics it contains, but its main character, Austerlitz, will be as well-known and unforgettable as David Copperfield or Jane Eyre are. It is funny to think that, when asking Jay why the novel was named after that town where a famous battle took place, he just said, read it and find out.

What I mostly enjoyed about Austerlitz was its pace and how the author intertwined a few subplots with the main plot (I promise I won't say anything about the story). Past, present, and a bunch of encounters. The narrator—whose name I don't remember; it was probably never mentioned—meets up with Austerlitz in not only quite a few places around Europe but at different times also. It feels both daunting and beautiful that they represent life: there are times when you are friends with someone, this person gets into your life for a while, and you become very good friends, but then, for some reason, your paths separate, but they might come together years, or even decades later. Austerlitz and the narrator developed a kind of bond that not even time could break. My friendship with Gero comes to mind as I type this: not only did we meet in a very awkward situation (both waiting outside of the classroom for one hour for our class to begin (first week of the term and I had just arrived in Buenos Aires) when they had sent an email saying there wouldn't be class that day—apparently everyone knew except for us who didn't check our emails), but our friendship is, even if we stop messaging each other for months, as genuine as it was back in 2018. I know every time we catch up on our lives again, there will be new things to say to one another. It will feel as though we had our last conversation just yesterday. Of course, Austerlitz has a lot more to say than we both say to each other.

Austerlitz is a story about belonging, about identity and resilience. A book with a bunch of existential ideas interwoven with historical facts and nonfiction that somewhat reminded me of Benjamin Labatut's The Maniac (it should be the other way around, shouldn't it?). After discussing my thoughts with Jay, I was finally able to see why he loves it so much. Or maybe not, and it's all an illusion of a past that is already gone.

My rating on a scale of 1 to 5:

Quality of writing [5/5]
Pace [4/5]
Plot development [4.5/5]
Characters [5/5]
Enjoyability [5/5]
Insightfulness [5/5]
Easy of reading [4/5]
Photos/Illustrations [N/A]

Total [32.5/7] = 4.64

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Searching for the Lost Identity

When I was reading 'Austerlitz' I did not want it to end in spite of its painful subject. It is definitely one of the best books I have read in 2024.
The author focuses on just one life of the millions affected by the Holocaust. Of course, other books describing similar traumatic experience (and true stories) have come to mind, for example, 'Un secret' by Philippe Grimbert and 'W or the Memory of Childhood' by Georges Perec but the dreamlike atmosphere of 'Austerlitz' mesmerizes you at once. It seems there are no clear borderlines between fiction and memoir, memoir and historical narrative as there is a very thin line between past and present.
Almost all his life the protagonist was subconsciously scared to open Pandora's box of his family's tragic past. At the same time his chilhood memories were knocking at him from the depth of his dreams. He could not feel whole without knowing where he came from, who he was, if he was ever loved in his life. And so Austerlitz starts his painstaking search for the answers piecing together the fragments of his past shattered by the war, embracing his true identity.
Reading this beautiful, melancholic, enigmatic and intellectually rich work, following these endless sentences has been like a meditative journey into memory's labyrinth. It gives you a new perspective into the themes of loss, displacement, memory, time and regaining one's identity.

'Our mightiest projects ... most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.'
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'Everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life.'
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'The dead are outside time ... and they are not the only ones.'
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'I felt ... as if the dead were returning from their exile.'
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'The pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us.'
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'I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life.'
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'We ... have appointments to keep in the past.'

[Το Άθχημο γατί του θενιόρ Γκουαναμίρου · Rating 5 out of 5]

Διάβασα σε αυτό το μυθιστόρημα, την τρίτη πιο συναισθηματικά φορτισμένη φράση, που έχω συναντήσει ποτέ σε λογοτεχνικό έργο. Η πρώτη είναι η αρχή του θρήνου της Αντιγόνης: «Ω, τάφε μου, ω, νυφιάτικό μου, ω αιώνια, βαθιά στη γη, σκαμμένη κατοικιά μου». Η δεύτερη είναι τα λόγια του γιατρού Πασκάλ, στην «Περιουσία των Ρουγκόν», στο πεδίο της μάχης: «Elle est morte». Και η τρίτη υπάρχει σε αυτό το βιβλίο είναι κραυγή της ηλικιωμένης Βέρας που αναφωνεί: «Jacquot, dis, est-ce que c'est vraiment toi?» Και στις τρεις περιπτώσεις έχουμε μια σπουδή επάνω στην απώλεια. Η χαμένη ζωή, τα χαμένα όνειρα, το χαμένο παρελθόν. Και ο Αούστερλιτς, ο κεντρικός ήρωας της ιστορίας του Sebald, είναι χαμένος. Ψάχνει να βρει κάτι, το οποίο δεν υπάρχει πλέον και συνεπώς είναι καταδικασμένος να υποφέρει από ένα αδιάκοπο αίσθημα κενού, που τον αρρωσταίνει και το καταρρακώνει ψυχικά και σωματικά. Ο ανώνυμος αφηγητής (ίσως μια εκδοχή του ίδιου του συγγραφέα), τον συναντά τυχαία, τον χάνει και τον ξαναβρίσκει, κι από ένα σημείο και μετά ο Αούστερλιτς τον διαλέγει για να του διηγηθεί την ιστορία του, την περιπέτειά του στην προσπάθειά του να βρει πληροφορίες σχετικά με τους χαμένους γονείς του, και το λησμονημένο του παρελθόν.

Ο τρόπος που λειτουργεί ο μηχανισμός της μνήμης, τα ερεθίσματα που ξεκλειδώνουν εικόνες από το παρελθόν, σε αυτό το έργο, ερμηνεύεται και διερευνάται με μια μέθοδο που θυμίζει κάτι από την ενδοσκόπηση του Προυστ, χωρίς ωστόσο να έχει την βεβαιότητα και τη λεπτομερή καταγραφή που αποτυπώνεται στο «Αναζητώντας τον χαμένο χρόνο». Γιατί στην προκειμένη περίπτωση ο ήρωας, δεν θυμάται. Παλεύει να θυμηθεί, προσπαθεί να διασώσει κάτι μέσα από τα σπαράγματα της μνήμης. Δεν καταφέρει και σπουδαία πράγματα, αλλά με τη φαντασία του και με ελάχιστα χειροπιαστά τεκμήρια (φωτογραφίες κυρίως, αλλά και αποκόμματα εισιτηρίων, καρέ από δυσεύρετα φιλμ και επιτόπιες έρευνες, συνομιλίες με αυτόπτες μάρτυρες και βιβλιογραφικές καταγραφές κτλ.) προσπαθεί να αναπληρώσει τα κενά. Είναι επιστήμονας ο Αούστερλιτς, αλλά δυστυχώς ανήκει σε εκείνη την θλιβερή κατηγορία των ωραίων μυαλών που έχουν μεγάλο πρόβλημα διαχείρισης του υλικού τους. Κι έτσι όλα παραμένουν μισοτελειωμένα, κρυπτικά, δυσερμήνευτα και απροσδιόριστα.

Αυτές οι φωτογραφίες που περιλαμβάνονται στο βιβλίο, μου έκαναν από την αρχή μεγάλη εντύπωση. Από το ξανθό αγοράκι στο εξώφυλλο του βιβλίου μέχρι το μικρό δάσος της εθνικής βιβλιοθήκης της Γαλλίας, όλες είναι αληθινές φωτογραφίες, τις οποίες τοποθετεί εικονογραφικά ο συγγραφέας σε στρατηγικά σημεία του έργου, έτσι ώστε να υπογραμμίζουν τα λεγόμενά του με μια επίφαση αληθοφάνειας. Αλλά ακόμα δεν έχω καταλάβει την τεχνική με την οποία δένει το υλικό του, ή πιο απλά τί ήρθε πρώτο η φωτογραφία, δηλαδή η εικόνα, ή το κείμενο; Γιατί πέρα από την κεντρική διήγηση του ήρωα που ψάχνει πληροφορίες για τους γονείς του, υπάρχουν πολλές μικρότερες και συντομότερες ιστορίες, πολύ χαλαρά δεμένες στον κορμό του έργου, στην ουσία είναι παρεκβάσεις από το κεντρικό θέμα, που, ωστόσο μέσα από τις φωτογραφίες, ή μάλλον χάρη σε αυτές, λειτουργούν σαν συνδετικοί κρίκοι και συνιστούν ένα ενιαίο και αριστοτεχνικά δεμένο σύνολο. Και το θέμα με αυτές τις φωτογραφίες είναι πως δεν τις στήνει και δεν τις δημιουργεί ο συγγραφέας επί τούτου, προϋπήρχαν και τις συνέλεξε και τις ενσωμάτωσε έτσι ώστε να μοιάζουν σαν να φτιάχτηκαν για να συνοδεύσουν τις ιστορίες του, τόσο ταιριαστές και απολύτως κατατοπιστικές είναι. Πολλές φορές ξεπερνούν σε ζωντάνια ακόμα και τις πιο λεπτεπίλεπτες και περίτεχνες περιγραφές του βιβλίου, όπως ας πούμε η εικόνα της μελαχρινής γυναίκας που υποτίθεται πως είναι η Άγκαθα, η μητέρα του Αούστερλιτς.

Διάβασα σε κάποιες κριτικές πως σε κάποιους αναγνώστες, ο κεντρικός ήρωας μοιάζει ανολοκλήρωτος και φασματικός. Για εμένα ισχύει το αντίθετο, βρήκα πως είναι πολύ χειροπιαστός και ανθρώπινος. Τον συμπάθησα και μου φάνηκε πως είχε μεγάλη συνέπεια. Είναι ο τρόπος έκθεσης των γεγονότων που βρήκα κάπως ψυχρό, αυτές οι αφηγήσεις μέσα στις αφηγήσεις που δεν αποτελούν την τυπική λογοτεχνική αναπαράσταση, σαν να θέλει ο συγγραφέας να μας υπενθυμίζει, αδιάκοπα, πως όσα αναφέρει, έχουν γίνει ήδη και έχουν ήδη τελειώσει και πως πρόκειται για μια συνάντηση ανάμεσα σε ζωντανούς και πεθαμένους. Σε ένα σημείο παραθέτει κιόλας μια όμορφη εξήγηση για το ποιόν αυτών των νεκρών, όταν λέει:

«Ο Έβαν έλεγε ιστορίες για τους πεθαμένους που χάθηκαν πρόωρα, που καταλάβαιναν πως στερήθηκαν τα όσα δικαιωματικά τους ανήκαν, και ήθελαν να επιστρέψουν πίσω στη ζωή. Κι αν είχες την ικανότητα, τότε μπορούσες να τους βλέπεις κάθε τόσο, έτσι έλεγε ο Έβαν. Με την πρώτη ματιά θύμιζαν κανονικούς ανθρώπους αλλά αν κοιτούσες προσεχτικότερα φαίνονταν το θολό περίγραμμά τους σαν να τρεμοπαίζει. Και ήταν συνήθως κάπως κοντύτεροι από αυτό που ήταν όσο ζούσαν, γιατί η εμπειρία του θανάτου, έλεγε ο Έβαν, μας μειώνει, όπως ένα κομμάτι από ύφασμα λινό, που μπαίνει μετά το πρώτο πλύσιμο. Οι πεθαμένοι τις περισσότερες φορές περπατούσαν μοναχοί τους, ωστόσο κάποιες φορές έβγαιναν σε μικρές παρέες. Τους είχαν δει να φορούν στολές με ζωηρά χρώματα ή τυλιγμένους σε γκρίζους μανδύες, να πορεύονται επάνω στον λόφο, πάνω από την πόλη, ακολουθώντας τον απαλό ρυθμό ενός τυμπάνου και ελάχιστα ψηλότεροι από τους αγροτικούς φράχτες τους οποίους διαπερνούσαν».

Αυτές οι ιστορίες μου θύμισαν την συνήθεια που έχουμε στον τόπο μου, όταν κάποιος θέλει να σε ρωτήσει αν πρόλαβες να γνωρίσεις κάποιον που έχει πλέον πεθάνει, δεν σε ρωτάει αν τον πρόλαβες ζωντανό, σε ρωτάει αν «τον θυμήθηκες». Όχι αν τον «θυμάσαι» αλλά αν «τον θυμήθηκες» κι έτσι κάπως διαχωρίζουν όσα ανήκουν στο παρελθόν, γιατί τελικά η δική μας αλλοιωμένη εικόνα είναι αυτό που παραμένει, όταν όλα βυθίζονται στην πιο αναπόφευκτη λήθη, αυτή που συνοδεύει τον θάνατο. Θυμήθηκα επίσης διαβάζοντας την προσπάθεια του ήρωα να συνδέσει το παρελθόν του με μια ξεχασμένη γλώσσα, μια από τις γλώσσες που άκουσε κατά την παιδική του ηλικία, πως η λέξη «veverka» που σημαίνει σκίουρος, ακούγεται παρόμοια με εκείνη που χρησιμοποιούμε κι εμείς στον τόπο μου γι’ αυτό το ζωάκι. Εμείς τα λέμε βερβερίτσες και πιστεύω πως τα βήτα είναι για την απαλή γούνα της ουράς τους, τα ρω για την ταχύτητά τους να σκαρφαλώνουν επάνω στα δέντρα και να χάνονται και τα έψιλον για τον ενθουσιασμό που πυροδοτεί συχνά το συναπάντημα με αυτά τα χαριτωμένα πλασματάκια. Κι είναι αυτές οι γλωσσικές θεωρίες που υποστηρίζουν πως κάνουμε λέξεις από ήχους και οι ήχοι αποτυπώνουν εικόνες και συναισθήματα.

Υπάρχουν επίσης πολλές, αχνές αλλά ισχυρές βιβλικές εικόνες μέσα στο έργο, το μωρό που σώζεται σε ένα καλάθι, τα τείχη της Ιεριχούς και ο μεγάλος κατακλυσμός η φυγή στην Αίγυπτο και η πορεία μέσα στην έρημο και φαίνεται πως όλες οι εκδοχές τους, μοιραία επαναλαμβάνονται με διαφορετικούς τρόπους μέσα στην ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας. Κάποιοι θα σωθούν και κάποιοι θα βουλιάξουν και είναι το υδάτινο στοιχείο, αυτό που καλύπτει τα πάντα τελικά, αυτό που διασώζει τα χρώματα και την πιο σπάνια και ακριβοθώρητη ομορφιά:

«Θυμάμαι, είπε ο Αούστερλιτς, πως κάποτε ο Αλφόνσο διηγήθηκε σε εμένα και στον ανιψιό του πως όλα σβήνονται μπροστά στα μάτια μας, και πως ήδη πολλά από τα ωραιότερα χρώματα έχουν χαθεί παντοτινά ή συνεχίζουν να υπάρχουν εκεί που δεν τα πιάνει ανθρώπου μάτι, στους υποβρύχιους κήπους βαθιά κάτω από την επιφάνεια της θάλασσας. Στα μικράτα του, μας είπε, συνήθιζε να περπατάει πάνω στους άσπρους βράχους του Ντέβον και της Κορνουάλης, εκεί που τα κύματα αιώνες τώρα είχαν σκάψει κοιλότητες και σπηλιές, θαυμάζοντας την ανεξάντλητη ποικιλία της λεπτεπίλεπτης φαντασμαγορίας που ταλαντευόταν ανάμεσα στα ζωικά, φυτικά και ορυκτά βασίλεια, τα ζωόφυτα, τα κοράλλια, τις θαλάσσιες ανεμώνες, τα εχινόδερμα, τα ανθόζωα και τα οστρακόδερμα που η παλίρροια τα ξέβραζε δυο φορές τη μέρα, ανάμεσα στα φύκια που τρεμούλιαζαν ολόγυρά τους, και σαν τραβιόταν το νερό, αποκάλυπταν την εξαίσια ιριδίζουσα ζωή τους μέσα στις λακκούβες, εκθέτοντας ξανά στο φως και στον αέρα όλες τις αποχρώσεις του ουράνιου τόξου, το σμαραγδί, το κρεμεζί και το τριανταφυλλί, το κίτρινο της ώχρας και το βελούδινο μαύρο».

Υπάρχει σε ένα σημείο, η ιστορία της εθνικής βιβλιοθήκης της Γαλλίας, που μεταφέρθηκε από το παλιό κτίριο στο καινούργιο. Το νέο είναι μοντέρνο, είναι σύγχρονο και εντυπωσιακά τεράστιο. Ωστόσο ο ήρωας, το απεχθάνεται, θεωρεί πως δεν είναι αρκετά φιλικό για τον αναγνώστη σε σύγκριση με το παλιό. Θεωρεί πως αποτελεί ένα μνημείο εγωισμού και μεγαλομανίας, χτισμένο επάνω σε έναν τόπο όπου παλιότερα είχε συντελεστεί ένα μεγάλο έγκλημα. Και τώρα υπάρχει εκεί ένα μικρό δάσος ανάμεσα στα βιβλία, ορατό από τις τεράστιες τζαμαρίες, ένα δάσος από δέντρα μεταφυτευμένα, εξόριστα από την αλλοτινή τους κατοικία, και συχνά τα πουλιά ζαλισμένα, πέφτουν νεκρά, χτυπώντας με δύναμη επάνω στα τζάμια που σαν αόρατο φρούριο, περιβάλλουν τα βιβλία. Τελικά, είναι αυτό ακριβώς, αυτές οι αόρατες οχυρώσεις που βαστούν αποτελεσματικότερα, ασύγκριτα καλύτερα από τις άλλες, τις πέτρινες και υλικές εκδοχές τους. Και τελικά, έτσι νομίζω, πως ο καθένας πρέπει να διαλέξει αν αυτό θα αποτελεί ένα είδος προστατευτικής μόνωσης ή μια μορφή απομόνωσης, μια δυσδιάκριτη αλλά απτή φυλακή.

[Ellie Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5?

Maybe I'm in a slumpp but this book felt too digressive for me while I did enjoy reading this from the subject matter and I liked the historical aspect x

[ліда лісова · Rating 5 out of 5]

терпіти не можу, коли книга мене чомусь учить, але ця навчила. а саме — ставитися до українців, що уникають власної історії й усіляко відхрещуються від внутрішніх пошуків радше не з роздратуванням, а зі щемким жалем. зрештою така поведінка не в останню чергу спричинена захисним механізмом. зебальд всеохопно (чи бодай на багатьох рівнях) показав як відбувається руйнація особистості, що надто довго піддається цьому механізмові. як знання замінюють пам’ять. і як це призводить до невміння говорити не лише про свою пам’ять, а й узагалі, як це відбирає тобі мову. аустерліц ніби зміг прокинутися з цього безпам’ятства. чи став він від того щасливим? ні. але почав перебувати в реальності й розуміти її.

а ще після “аустерліца” — не те шоб вдається від’єбатися нарешті від себе, але принаймні — якось легше “відчувати провину через своє дотепер зумисне небажання все це знати”.

метод зебальда і сам зебальд — дуже унікальні. чого вартує його вміння говорити про складне через архітектуру і невипадкові випадкові знимки. навіть у його довжелезних зебальдських реченнях немає жодного зайвого слова, бо вони взагалі не самоціль, а інструмент (і дуже потужний у його руках. зрештою, як і всі інші).

[Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Even now, when I try to remember them, when I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk and read the words of the captions—Former Office, Printing Works, Huts, Jacques Ochs Hall, Solitary Confinement Cell, Mortuary, Relics Store, and Museum—the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”

I have to admit I was a little nervous at first. The novel is more than 400 pages with no chapters or even paragraphs. It felt like climbing a perpendicular rock face, with nothing to assist me but em-dashes on which to rest my feet. Much of the time, my eyes would dutifully go down each page, focusing briefly on every line, while my mind was many miles away. Then I’d do a double-take worthy of Wile E. Coyote and plunge into the abyss, arms flailing like a scarecrow in a windstorm, until the rope attached to my harness yanked me short.

Perhaps what kept me going were the copious pencil scribblings left behind by a previous borrower of my library copy (such a crime would have been unforgivable had I not been so confused about what to look for). Elements that might have seemed irrelevant in a superficial reading took on the importance they deserved: pigeons (“To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin”), columbaria, moths (“I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies”), buttoned gloves, star-shaped patterns…

Sifting through the remnants of his past, like Walter Benjamin’s materialist historian, Austerlitz has to conduct himself like archaeologists excavating the ruins of a forgotten city—has “to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.” The fragments Austerlitz finds, like the ones Benjamin describes, are already gone, or else so decayed as to be hardly decipherable. Unsatisfied with every stroke of the spade, Austerlitz “must … assay [the] spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers.” Dan Jacobson’s vertigo before the chasm of the Kimberly diamond mines, where so many Africans were sacrificed, toward the end of the novel, becomes the metaphor for the “vanished past” of Austerlitz’s family and people (and Jacobson’s own), which “can never be brought up from those depths again.” (Jacobson: “everything about [my grandfather] as an individual that had been hidden from me before I went [to Lithuania] remains hidden still, and always will do so. His secrets are enclosed in time past like the pattern inside an uncut agate stone: not just beyond amendment or erasure, but unknowable too.”) Austerlitz’s ghosts can’t be laid to rest, and he himself becomes a mere shadow, unable to get into the sunlight from the shadow of the Holocaust, made ghostly by Time, grief, and the vanishing of things.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the Holocaust

This extraordinary book is the inner narrative of an elderly adopted Englishman trying to recapture a childhood shattered by the Holocaust, and to come to grips with the resultant sickness of postwar Europe. But this Freudian search is firmly rooted in the detail of everyday things: a childhood in Wales, curiosities of natural history, old photographs, the architecture of railroad stations. Its multi-layered narrative style, almost devoid of paragraphs, keeps you at a distance yet sucks you in; this is a person one is glad to know, and his half-formed memories resonate with one's own. I was half-way through the book before I realized that it was a translation from the German, brilliantly handled by Anthea Bell; but translation seems appropriate to a work which is itself a work of translation; Sebald's evocative words and images seem written simultaneously in one's own tongue and in another that is forever foreign.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my own first career, like that of the title character, was as an architectural historian, my early schooling was also at a private establishment on the Welsh borders, and many of Austerlitz' viewpoints and experiences (though not of course his early childhood in Nazi Europe) closely parallel my own. I cannot guarantee that readers from other backgrounds will feel such close identification with either Austerlitz or the book's unnamed narrator—except that one of the qualities which distinguishes a great novelist (as I believe Sebald to be) is the ability to make the reader identify with a character, no matter how different his background may be from one's own.

If interested, see also my comparison of this book to D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel, another book that approaches the Holocaust from an unexpected angle, there explicitly Freudian.