Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful, albeit complex, story!
Review: Austerlitz is not your typical novel. First of all, the narrator's identity is unknown. Alas, the narrator simply recounts the story of Jacques Austerlitz's exploits. Austerlitz himself does not fully know his own identity, and he wants to discover truths about himself, his family, his heritage, even his own name. He had always believed he was Welsh -- that is until he discovers that the people he'd believed to be his family had adopted him. He travels to Eastern Europe to learn about his past. Austerlitz is a fascinating novel with an interesting structure and approach. This is a rather complex novel -- you must read between the lines to get to the heart of the truth. This novel is absolutely beautiful and I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Resurrection
Review: AUSTERLITZ is an oblique and terrifying journey into the machinery of the Nazi death state. Its true subject becomes apparent only slowly; and as such one could say that the narrative strategy mimics and comments upon the slow unfolding of the grotesque design of the Nazis, of the diabolical destruction of European Jewry as a means to world domination... Poised in the realm of remembrance and loss, this astounding work of literature seeks through Austerlitz to show how the grotesque brutality and vicious efficiency of the Nazi regime continues to reverberate throughout time and space. Brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: Translation
Review: Curious and skeptical, having read this wonderful
book in german, I went to the few available sample
pages to see inside the english version and find
out what it would feel like in english. I was
immeditely impressed by the sheer beauty of Anthea
Bell's work. I remember, years ago, when
I first read Shakespeare and then Schlegel & Tiek's translation,
not being able to decide which I preferred.
I will now read the book again in english, looking
forward to a similar (and very rare) experiencie,
this time the other way round.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard Going, but ultimately Rewarding
Review: There are many books that can be categorized as "Holocaust" literature, and while the numerous books approach this subject from many angles, few attack it from the point of view of Sebald in his last work, Austerlitz. It is unfortunate that I do not read German, as the book is translated, and I cannot comment on the original novel, only the translated work. This book is hard reading, and demands a lot of the reader's attention and concentration. There are no chapters and few pauses, and the sentance structure is difficult to comprehend. The whole story is like a long monologue, and the reader may feel somewhat removed from the narrator of the story, which I believed was a modern literary device. I don't believe the narrator existed as a real person. This narrator serves to filter Austerlitz's story to the reader. The story reads like a "ghost story" as the reader feels oddly "removed" from the narrator and Austerlitz. What you think of this book will depend on your interest in this subject matter. It's a haunting but difficult work to read.
Rating:
Summary: Sebald's Finest Achievement
Review: Austerlitz is the most profound book I have ever read and moved me greatly. The prose is deceptively simple and beautifully realised. The power of Sebald's narrative through its detached and solemn tone and the subtle interweaving and interplay of various strands leaves the reader grasping for a template to paste all these unnerving images onto. This, I feel, is a very deliberate attempt by the author to engross the reader in the mind of the displaced Austerlitz thereby blurring the boundary between our experience (of reading the text) and the recounting of memories that Austerlitz grapples with. Austerlitz' life is lived and felt through the utter authenticity of every word, aided by the effectiveness of the black and white photographs that pepper the text. Discussions about the identity of the narrator, if it is a biography or novel, or even the quest for 'plot', are peripheral issues and are a case of mistaking the wood for the trees. Sebald's classic is so persuasive because it resonates with how we actually think and grapple for order in our own world. This book is an attempt to raise the veil that clouds our intellectual vision so that those haunting souls that vaguely shimmer in the twilight of Sebald's works may one day have their voice heard. This he has set us on the path to achieving. Please read this masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: An exercise in frustration
Review: After reading numerous favorable reviews following the publication of Austerlitz, I purchased the hardback edition, yet never made time to read it until recently. Although I am an avid reader, and although I teach both writing and literature at the university level, I found this novel almost unreadable. In fact, reading the book felt like an assignment from my years in graduate school--something I was compelled to do, but not something I particularly enjoyed or longed to repeat. Sometimes when I am teaching a literature class, I identify an author who was not understood or appreciated during his or her lifetime. I also point out particular works of literature that were not immediately popular, but that become better understood later. My students and I often chuckle over the misguided reading public of times past and smile smugly (and probably entirely too arrogantly), secure in our own interpretations. Therefore, before committing myself to a negative review of Austerlitz, I gave the subject a great deal of thought. Could I have missed something in the book? Was Sebald a genius that I am ill-equipped to acknowledge? Was I one of those unenlightened readers about whom future students would laugh? I think not. I know that a difference exists between LIKING a work of art or literature and APPRECIATING a work; nonetheless, I find it hard to comprehend this novel's critical success. Yes, I can appreciate non-linear structure and symbolism. Yes, I am familiar with literary experimentation. Yes, I understand Modernism. Yes, I "got" the imagery. I am even enthusiastic about fresh approaches to writing. (I am no stranger to intellectual books; I am quite confident about my reading comprehension ability, despite the inference by several reviewers that those of us who disliked the novel might be "challenged" in some way by Sebald's intelligence.) Nevertheless, as I read the novel, I could almost envision Sebald struggling over every (seemingly endless) sentence; the whole text felt too deliberately crafted. While I did finish the novel, I felt that the effort to do so was entirely too much work. Rather than a dramatic literary breakthrough, this novel seems to me an exercise in cleverness by the writer--and certainly an exercise in frustration for the reader. This novel is about an important subject, but readers hoping for a plot will be disappointed. As for format/design, the book is also problematic; while readers might be accustomed to white space for visual pauses, they will find no chapters and very little paragraphing here. The shifting point of view is distracting, and the use of various languages (and shifts from English to French to German, etc. randomly) is frustrating--even for those of us who speak two or three languages passably. I WANTED to like this book, but I simply felt misled by all the hype. With all due respect to the late author, I cannot recommend this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Painful
Review: With all due respect to the distinguished Sebald, I found this book to be torturous. I was forever waiting for a plot. Not a book to get lost it.
Rating:
Summary: Kindertransport
Review: I usually disapprove of fiction about the Holocaust because I do not think we should ever be allowed to finish reading any account of these events with the sense of relief that comes from knowing that this was only a tale. Sebald overcomes that moral quibble by making his protaganist one who gradually realises what he has escaped from.
Austerlitz was brought to Britain as a four year old child on one of the Kindertransports organized by Lord Baldwin. He has blotted out his earliest memories and they gradually come back to him as he leaves Wales and comes to London and then travels in Europe. He is a historian of architecture and some of his memories are reawakened by studying buildings, such as railroad stations, that he might have seen as a child (and which are illustrated by Michael Brandon Jones's superb photographs). This gives scope for display of Sebald's immense learning, and I can sympathize with those who felt the story was bogged down in details and lists and was overly erudite, but this erudition is part of the narrative. For example I checked the quotation "yn yr hesg ar fin yr afon" and found my Bible had it differently, but in a Methodist Sunday school in the 1940's they would have been using the old Bishop Morgan version, then I reread the second chapter of Exodus and caught the parallel.
It should perhaps be irrelevant to the artistic standing of the book, but I don't think it is possible to read it without the fact that the author was German making some impact. The translation is amazing. The few Briticisms (such as "allotment" and "conjuror") are conistent with Austerlitz's background. The words stringing together to make overlong adjectives that we in translations from the German sometimes find we do not here encounter. When Anthea Bell meets a compound German word that is necessary to the story because it displays something of German bureaucratic character, she leaves it in the original German, and it falls perfectly into place.
Rating:
Summary: A miracle
Review: A beautiful work that deconstructs memory, "Austerlitz" is the heir to Kafkan and Borgesian modernism. Even more, the novel illustrates that the protocols assigned to us by Walter Benjamin (fragments; allegory) and Freud (the uncanny; contours of trauma) still make perfect sense. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: endless lists - no direct narration
Review: the story of a young man who tries to find his past, after discovering, well into his teens that he was adopted is convoluted. it also evokes little emotion, despite the emotional upheavals the main character, Austerliiz, undergoes. the text is bogged down by endless lists. as he enters a room he describes, in a list, all he sees there. In the ghetto, he lists the occupations undertaken by the inmates "industrialists and manufacters, lawyers and doctors, rabbis and university professops, singers and composers, bank managersm businessmen, shorthand typists, housewives, farmers, labourers and millionaires, people from Prague and the rest of the Protectorate, from Slovakia, from Denmark and Holland.." and a host of other places. In a cemetery, "we walked past monuments erected by the Victorians to commerate their dead, past mausoleums, marble crosses, stelae and obelisks, bulbous urns and statues of angels, many of them wingless of otherwise mutilated....." The flow of the story is lost. The attempts to find deeper meaning in the prose are thwarted. The narrator tells us what Austerlitz said by interjecting at regular intervals "Austerlitz said". When Austerlitz finds his childhood nurse (Vera) and begins to piece together his past, the text says "Vera said,continued Austerlitz". When Vera says things that were told her by others we have "Blank to me, said vera, according to Austerlitz". If this is supposed to demonstrate to the reader how hard it is to get direct information, it is an annoying was of doing so. Occasionally, there are a few redeeming recurrent images. That's why I gave it two rather than one star.
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