Product Description

In the summer of 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on one of the Kindertransports and placed with foster parents in Wales. For reasons of their own, the childless Calvinist couple erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity. Throughout his life Austerlitz is haunted by feelings of otherness, but it is not until retirement that he embarks on a journey to make sense of his curious early memories and explores what happened to him half a century ago.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4253 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-04
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
WG Sebald's Austerlitz has something of the fractured narrative and wanderlust of his novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, and continues to develop their obsession with history, loss and memory--or more precisely in this case, forgetting. In the decade since the original German publication of Vertigo, Sebald has established himself as indisputably one of Europe's most interesting and lauded writers.

In 1967, the narrator bumps into a man in the salle de pas perdus of Antwerp's Central Station. Thus begins a long if intermittent acquaintance, during which he learns the life story of this stranger, retired architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. Raised as Dafydd Elias by a strict Welsh Calvinist ministry family, it is only at school that Austerlitz learns his true name--and only years later, by a series of chance encounters, that he allows himself to discover the truth of his origins, as a Czech child spirited away from his mother and out of Nazi territory on the Kindertransport. He returns to confront the childhood traumas that have made him feel that "I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life."

In this writer's hands, Austerlitz's tale of personal emotional repression becomes a metaphor for Europe's smothered past. Sebald wittily explores the tricks of time and space, unearthing Europe as an unconscious palimpsest. Delighting in lists and unfeasibly lengthy descriptions, Sebald can turn anything to poetry--even the alleged health benefits of Marienbad's Auschowitz springs become "a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms" (luckily, all his characters seem to be able to hold forth this way). Indeed, Sebald writes with such preternatural lucidity that even a harrowing account of writer's block ironically becomes a celebration of his own quite clearly unblockable virtuosity.

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

Review
"Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century" The Times

Waterstone's Books Quaterly
"Critics fall over themselves to heap praise upon this brilliant and original writer... there can be no finer introduction."

Customer Reviews

The unbearable lightness of memory
I was half way through this wonderful book when I read of Sebald's death in a road accident last weekend. Fortunately for us, it stands as a brilliant culmination of his four 'novels', but also shows us what we have lost.

Austerlitz has been driven to the brink of mental illness by the suppression of early childhood memories and the refusal to hear of anything that has occurred in Europe since the nineteenth century. Following his upbringing in North Wales, his life in London and his travels in Prague we see reality creeping in. Austerlitz slowly discovers himself and in doing so discovers the twentieth century for us.

Part of the pleasure of reading Sebald is the prose - measured, precise and beautifully translated - and the inclusion of photographs that contribute as much to the atmosphere as the text. There is also much of Thomas Bernhard here - the lack of paragraph breaks, the long sentences, the story told by a first person relating a long conversation with a second or third, a main character who has spent his life researching some obscure topic but will never manage to put pen to paper (Bernhard's Concrete and The Lime Works), and a preoccupation with compromised morals. There is perhaps even a nod to Bernhard with the description of the Nazi rally in Vienna's Heldenplatz - the subject of a play by Bernhard.

I was entranced by The Rings Of Saturn but Austerlitz is even better - easily the best book I read this year. That we will not have any more books like this I find unbearable at the moment.

If Austerlitz appeals to you, then do try Bernhard too - The Loser or Cutting Timber would be a good place to start.

Dense, meaningful, possibly significant
Sebald tells a fictional story of the adult Austerlitz's search for his past, from his birth in Prague, through his early childhood, leading to his passage to Britain just before WW2 on one of the last trains sending young children to safety.

Sebald adopts a deliberately meandering style, the narrative interspersed with thoughts about science, architecture, 20th century history. The book is introspective and dense, drawing the reader into a melancholic frame of mind, around thoughts of holocaust, persecution and brutality.

Among his many descriptions of European architecture he writes about the Palace of Justice in Brussels, ". . . a kind of wonder, which is in itself a dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins"...

In reading a book like this, it is necessary to ask the question what is it about? In my view, Sebald seeks to show his readers that the consciousness of the awful horrors of the last century, effectively put a stop to any lightness or levity in the present. Our bleakest expectations of human behaviour colour our experience today so that all is shot through with memories of the dreadful things that happened a mere 60 years ago (and continue to recur to this day).

Not a happy read, but probably an "important" book and having read Austerlitz a week or so ago I find my thoughts returning to it, and wanting to revisit it.

Incidentally, the book is beautifully produced, being illustrated with a collection of black and white photographs, some of which I assume Sebald shot himself, and others which I imagine are "found" objects from his collection. The photos are incredibly melancholic, presenting an impression of extreme lonliness and human isolation. The book itself is beautifully presented, printed on rich paper with an elegant typescript and a high quality binding. I suspect it will be a collectors item in years to come.

engrossing and sagacious
Jacques Austerlitz, in the early 1990s, is a man in his late fifties; he has grown up in Wales - although we hear little of his life there - and now, is searching for the family that he was separated from as a child of five.
Austerlitz is a wonderful book about the War, Europe, architecture and family, through which we are given insight to a fascinating life and mind.
The narrative style is highly original and effective, the narrator remaining largely anonymous - we learn little of him - but, through his chance meetings over the years, are told about the life of a gentleman named Austerlitz, an architectural historian.
Sebald tells it Russian Doll-style, in the voice of his narrator, as a retelling of what Austerlitz had told him, and occasionally, of what further characters, in turn, have told Austerlitz - a wonderful play on the theme of representation, enjoyably demanding to read, and engaging too.
Sebald’s prose is delectable and inimitable, and syntactically he eschews, here as in other works, the use of chaptering, paragraphing and parenthesising; inverted commas or paragraph breaks for dialogue; and prefers not to use punctuation such as colons or semi-colons, using instead, numerous commas and intricately long sentencing. This all adds up to an enveloping and engrossing prose style that captivates you as each successive moment of this curious meandering unfurls.
In a sense, the use of photography and illustration act as successful and sensitive punctuations within this solid and confident body of text, and refreshingly, are not dwelt on - serving simply to delight the artistic palate and compliment the lyrical work - like a glass of Champagne served with soft cheese and crackers; I quickly found myself lost in the enigmatic detailing of these worlds within the world of this novel, and they leave you pondering - What came first? - the image or the text.
Sebald's Germanic, precise and probing style of writing does lack passion in the romantic sense, but he compensates this immeasurably with his striking poeticism and labyrinthine intellectualism; he is a writer quite unlike any other and, I did, for some time, want to read no other books than his.
His content is informal and evocative, somewhat like having a quiet conversation with a professor over a cup of coffee and some cake as they display a close and intricate erudition.
In conclusion, I can highly recommend this novel; his untimely death was simply tragic, but he has left us with a valuable, worthy and multifarious œuvre, and reading Sebald called to my mind the work of Milan Kundera, whom I have enjoyed equally and, any of whose work, in this context, I can recommend in addition.