Rating: 
Summary: A LIFE THAT NEVER WAS
Review: This novel is obviously not everyone's cup of tea, but it's mine. I was lent it without having asked for it or even heard of it, and to have a hope of enjoying it I would suggest - don't read too many reviews before you start. Favourable as well as unfavourable, they could frighten you off. The book begins with a digression, but there's no way of knowing that if one is starting from cold. It could be a travelogue, showing the fascination with detail and the reflective, analytical and detached cast of mind that pervades it right to the end. The main narrative eases itself in shortly after without any change of pace, style or tone, and the calm passionless idiom never varies up to the last page. Jacques Austerlitz was a refugee from the nazis, but too young to have clear recollections of the time. He was brought up by a childless and cheerless Welsh couple, given a new name and told nothing about his origins. These come to light, as they can in novels, when as a talented and above-average pupil he turns out a model of an essay on the subject of - the battle of Austerlitz, wouldn't you believe. He reminds me of nothing so much as the 'faint phantom' who visits Penelope in the Odyssey. Everything he says is reported by the 'shell' narrator, and his own narrations in their turn contain the reported utterances of others. A brief allusion is made to his slight resemblance to Wittgenstein, and it's hard not to think of the philosopher repeatedly in this tale of a lonely, compulsive, brooding thinker whose emotions and whose very identity have been buried and repressed. He makes his own Odyssey to discover what he can about it, and his 3-week bout of amnesia is, for me, one of the most telling and effective touches in the book. To me this is not another piece of Holocaust-literature, but it has its own highly individual slant on the era and on the pettiness as well as the brutality that made up that deviation of the human spirit and mind. There is a lot more to the book than the ghostly Austerlitz. He and his narrator are interested in places and things for their own sake, not just in relation to him. I share this outlook in my own way, and as it happens the story took me to some of my own favourite spots - Prague, the strangely empty and unwelcoming Mawddach estuary, the southern Rhine valley, even the old Liverpool Street railway terminus with its gloomy double pillars. It informed me on subjects I knew nothing about, e.g. moths and urban fortifications. Austerlitz even attended the same Oxford college as I did, and I wonder who the real people were (or are) whose photographs we are shown purporting to be Austerlitz as a boy and as a young rugby-player. The book does not read in the least like a translation. It is in what I might call 'perfect English' with the intentional implication that you would know it was not an English-speaker speaking. That is all part of the effect, as is the absence of chapter-division, paragraphs and quotation-marks. If that sounds daunting in any way, let me report quite truthfully that I was well into the book before I even noticed. For me, a nigh-on-compulsive read.
Rating:
Summary: A second generation holocaust story
Review: Sebald's book is an exquisite description of the echo of the holocaust in central and western Europe. The narrative centers on a historian of architecture who had been adopted by a Welsh couple during the Second World War. As he searches for his past he discovers that he had come to Great Britain on one of the trains that brought Jewish children to safety from Nazi-occupied Europe. In an attempt to learn more about his parents he travels to Czechoslovakia and France and retraces their fascinating but tragic lives. This story presents the holocaust as a dark void that weighs heavily on the life of the next generation. The book is exquisitely written, and the descriptions of the journeys and persons are incredibly detailed and, for this member of the Czech second generation, uncannily accurate. Photographs of buildings and other inanimate objects help set the mood. The book should not be read in a hurry because it starts slowly and takes off gradually. The patient reader will be rewarded by hauntingly beautiful descriptions of events, places and states of mind, all connected by the indelible mark of the Holocaust.
Rating: 
Summary: enough!
Review: Please, let me never read the words "said Austerlitz" again - ever!
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully sad
Review: This novel is very different from any other kind of good literature being written today. It has no chapters or divisions; instead, it is a long monologue briefly interrupted by the unnamed narrator's change of settings and time. Throughout the book, Jacques Austerlitz tells us the story of his life and of his origins, as he goes on discovering them. Raised by a childless Welsh couple, Austerlitz finds out around his 15th year that he is from Jewish descent and that he fled Europe when he was four years old, shortly before the outbreak of WWII.
Austerlitz becomes a historian of architecture and travels around Europe (the book is filled with beautiful black and white pictures), but at some point he feels the urgent need to find out about his origins, after a series of nervous breakdowns. What follows is the extraordinary and painful discovery of the fate of his parents and, as a parallel, of Europe in those disastrous years. Sebald's prose is terse and fluid (even if, like me, you don't speak German, you can tell that the translation is really good), his ruminations on a number of subjects is never boring but enlightening, and the story of the narrator and Austerlitz's encounters is incredible but essential to the storyline.
Several passages are likely to remain in your memory. For me, some of them were life at his youth's friend's family house in Wales, the naturalist excursions and the sighting of moths, the visit to Marienbad, and especially his conversations with his aged ex-nurse in Prague. One good thing about the book is the descriptions of European cities, which are very inspiring. In short, this novel is very good and rewarding. Its main subject is the search for identity, but by no means is it the only one. Sebald's death late last year gives it an increased sense of nostalgia and melancholy, and it will likely be regarded later as one of the best novels written at the beginning of this enigmatic century.
Rating:
Summary: A completely breathtaking experience
Review: For those readers fortuate enough to have read W.G. Sebald's inimitable novels "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn" this latest book by one of the most unique and important literary voices writing today will only add to the admiration building for Sebald and his hauntingly beautiful "Austerlitz." That the work was written in German and translated by the sensitive Anthea Bell somehow adds to the universal impact of Sebald's mind and peculiar technique of telling stories. There are no paragraphs, no chapters, and only an occasional inch of space to bring pause to the writing. True, the technique of placing photographs of "fictional places" encountered by the writer's characters does allow some visual pause, but those pauses are purely additive. Sebald writes about a man (Austerlitz) who despite his lushly satisfying intellectual life of an architectural historian finds himself in search of his roots. That those roots were blurred by the atrocites of Hitler's Kindertransport program (Jewish children were sent to England by parents hoping for their safety as the wings of evil flapped menacingly in the air) only makes Austerlitz' journey to self discovery the more poignant. His revisiting the sites of his true parents in Prague and Marienbad and Terezinbad, Paris, and Belgium produce some of the most beautifully wrought elegies found in the written word. His walking among the horrors of the obsessive compulsive Hitlerian Final Solution Program is devasting in the way that only researching one's history from time-lapsed memories and visual stimuli can create. Some readers may be put off by the intial rambling technique of getting to the journey that fills the first quarter of this book, not helped by getting adjusted to the pages-long sentences and lack of chapters or pauses. But reflect on the fact that our own minds never stop when obsessed with the desire to know and understand our place in the universe and these inital trivial roadblocks will fade. Eventually Sebald's style ... you into not only a story of great magnitude, passion, and tenderness, it does so with some of the most liquidly gorgeous prose you are likely to encounter. This is the finest of Sebald's books to date. Here is an incredible talent who, thankfully, is steadily producing one fine book after another. Astonishing!
Rating:
Summary: enough!
Review: Please, let me never read the words "said Austerlitz" again - ever!
Rating:
Summary: Retracing the steps
Review: I picked up the book because I was intrigued by the premise of _Austerlitz_. At the age of 15, the headmaster of his school informs young Daffyd that he is not the son of a Welsh minister and his wife, rather Jacques Austerlitz, a Czech Jewish boy, who was adopted right before the war broke out in Europe. His parents sent him through Kindertransport to avoid being captured in the war. The complete story is told by an anonymous narrator over a 30 year span. Our narrator meets Austerlitz in the 1960s, and the two become acquaintances. They continue to correspond as each character travels around Europe and America. Each time they meet, Austerlitz relates information about his life. Therefore, nearly the whole book is told in a story form: the narrator telling us what Austerlitz initially told him. I really liked the premise of this book, but was disappointed in the style. Because of the narrator-style, the reader feels removed from the overall story. Austerlitz's life, and his journies were very interesting, but extremely detailed. I found myself becoming slightly bored with the long descriptive passages, and tangential information.
Rating: 
Summary: over rated and dissapointing
Review: I read this book based on its many positive reviews. However I did not find it to be as exceptional as others would lead you to believe. Firstly, as mentioned in other reviews, the story is told by un unknown narrator, a device that distances the reader from the subject, but serves no other purpose. Then, there is no plot to speak of, but rather a series of observations and comments on subjects ranging from architectural history to botany. The book includes several highly critical passages of modern architecture that point to the fact that Austerlitz is an architectural historian obsessed with the old glory of buildings in the past and unable to understand the relevance of contemporary architecture. While well written and almost poetic at times, it sheds no light on the historical events that led to Austerlitz to search for his parents. I would not recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: fine restrained beauty
Review: Sebald creates a book of beautiful language and literary structure. He also expresses ideas with this powerful form. I could not put it down. Like visiting the formerly Jewish districts of the cities of Germany or Austria, it achieves its high impact because it convinces of the enormity of what was lost, what remains lost, to so many European cities and their people.
Rating:
Summary: A haunting book
Review: This book tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz. In 1939, he was sent to England on a Kinderstransport and placed in a foster family. His parents quickly erase from Jacques all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, Austerlitz made a career as a historian of architecture and found the past returning to haunt him - having avoided all clues that might reveal his origin. He is thus forced to explore what happened to him fifty years before. And so begins a journey into the darkest moments of European history. This book combines fiction, memoir, travelogue and philosophy. It is also richly illustrated with very moving pictures and photographs. Sebald is one of the most extraordinary writers of the 20th century and Austerlitz's story is mesmeric.
|
