W. G. Sebald - Austerlitz

With untraceable swiftness and assurance, W. G. Sebalds writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circumstances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus, the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that makes his books, one by one, indispensable. He evokes at once the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the inconsolable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment and its ground of memory. Each book seems to be something that surely was impossible, and each (upon every re-reading) is unique and astonishing.

W. S. M ERWIN

With W. G. Sebalds haunting new book, Austerlitz, we are transported to a memoryscapea twilight, fogbound world of half-remembered images and ghosts that is reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergmans Wild Strawberries, Kafkas troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Prousts Remembrance of Things Past . [Austerlitz] serves as the perfect introduction to Mr. Sebalds work for readers unfamiliar with his ouevre while standing on its own as a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination.

M ICHIKO K AKUTANI , The New York Times

Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adornos dictum that after it, there can be no art.

The New York Times Book Review

Sebald is the Joyce of the twenty-first century. His tale of one mans odyssey through the dark ages of European history, which synthesizes a canon of Continental thought and literature, is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world.

The Times (London)

W. G. Sebald is a monstera gorgeous and unwaveringly assured writer, a bold formal innovator, and a man always plunging into the core of identity, singular and national. In Austerlitz, hes created his richest and most emotionally devastating story.

D AVE E GGERS

One emerges from a Sebald novel shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed.

A NITA B ROOKNER

A remarkable writera sort of Teutonic Borges domiciled in England.

S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE

One of the most original new voices to have come out of Europe in recent years.

P AUL A USTER

If you thought literary modernism was dead, guess again. The spirit of such masters as Kafka and Borges lives on in the novels of W. G. Sebald. For Mr. Sebald, not only do big questions still exist, but so do the desire and the will to answer them.

The Wall Street Journal

In the summer of 1967, a man who remains unnamed but who resembles the author W. G. Sebald, is visiting Belgium. At the Centraal Station in Antwerp, he sees a fellow traveler, with fair, curiously wavy hair, who is wearing heavy walking boots, workmans trousers made of blue calico, and a well-made but antiquated jacket. He is intently studying the room and taking notes. This is Jacques Austerlitz. The two men fall into conversation, have dinner at the station restaurant, and continue to talk into the night. Austerlitz is a voluble scholarhe explains, to the books narrator, about the slightly grotesque display of colonial confidence represented by Antwerps Centraal Station, and talks generally about the history of fortification. It is often our mightiest projects, he suggests, that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.

Austerlitz and the Sebald-like narrator meet againa few months later, in Brussels; then, later still, on the promenade at Zeebrugge. It emerges that Jacques Austerlitz is a lecturer at an institute of art history in London, and that his scholarship is unconventional. He is obsessed with monumental public buildings, like law courts and prisons, railway stations and lunatic asylums, and his investigations have swollen beyond any reasonable raison detre, proliferating in his hands into endless preliminary sketches for a study, based entirely on his own views, of the family likeness between all these buildings. For a while, the narrator visits Austerlitz regularly in London, but they fall out of touch until 1996, when he happens to meet Austerlitz again, this time at Liverpool Street Station. Austerlitz explains that only recently has he learned the story of his life, and he needs the kind of listener that the narrator had been in Belgium, thirty years before.

And so Austerlitz begins the story that will gradually occupy the rest of the book: how he was brought up in a small town in Wales, with foster parents; how he discovered, as a teenager, that his true name was not Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz; how he went to Oxford, and then into academic life. Though clearly a refugee, for many years Austerlitz was unable to discover the precise nature and contour of his exile until experiencing a visionary moment, in the late 1980s, in the Ladies Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station. Standing transfixed for perhaps hours, in a room hitherto unknown to him (and about to be demolished, to enable an expansion of the Victorian station), he feels as if the space contains all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained. He suddenly sees, in his minds eye, his foster parents, but also the boy they had come to meet, and he realizes that he must have arrived at this station a half century ago.

It is not until the spring of 1993, and having suffered a nervous breakdown in the meantime, that Austerlitz has another visionary experience, this time in a Bloomsbury bookshop. The bookseller is listening to the radio, which features two women discussing the summer of 1939, when, as children, they had come on the ferry Prague to England, as part of the Kindertransport: only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well, Austerlitz tells the narrator. The mere mention of the name Prague impels Austerlitz to the Czech capital, where he eventually discovers his old nanny, Vera Ryanov, and uncovers the stories of his parents abbreviated lives. His father, Maximilian Aychenwald, escaped the Nazis in Prague by leaving for Paris; but, we learn at the end of the book, he was eventually captured and interned in late 1942, in the French camp of Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His mother, Agta Austerlitz, stayed on in Prague, insouciantly confident of her prospects, but was rounded up and sent to the Terezn ghetto (better known by its German name of Theresienstadt) in December 1942. Of the final destination of Maximilian and Agta we are not told, but can easily infer the worst: Vera tells us only that Agta was sent east from Terezn, in September 1944.

This short recital, poignant though its content is, represents a kind of vandalism to Sebalds beautiful novel, and I offer it only in the spirit of orientation. It leaves out, most importantly, all the ways in which Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitzs story a broken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader too, is involved in a journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberate frustration of detection, the perpetuation of an enigma. By the end of the novel, we certainly know a great deal about Jacques Austerlitzabout the tragic turns of his life, his family background, about his obsessions and anxieties and breakdownsbut it cant be said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not a self. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to quit the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it.