Austerlitz

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: In evaluating this novel it is difficult to set aside what might be a false reverence for its subject matter - the Holocaust - and for its author who recently, and tragically, died. But Sebald's novel is so good those factors don't matter. One might criticize its complex, overlong, perfectly constructed sentences for failing to capture the style of spoken language. But what they do capture is an elegiac tone perfectly appropriate to the subject. Similarly, the emphasis on repetitive narration rather than dramatization, and the disconcerting jumps from one decade to the next with only the barest pause in conversation, will leave some readers feeling disengaged and disorientated. But again this is an effective technique: it creates the impression of a seamless interconnection between past, present and future - a sense that a person's life, (and a world's history), cannot be neatly compartmentalised into specific places and times, but is rather an unfolding story continually being told. Austerlitz is an alienated man, obsessively trying to find a way into a past which he cannot fully recover, forced to live under the oppressive weight of an absence he may never resolve. Sebald's hypnotic narrative style subtly recreates that experience for the reader. It's haunting, compelling, and highly impressive. Readers who appreciate this should also enjoy "Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels - a similarly impressive meditation on history, memory and loss.

Rating:
Summary: An important and scholarly piece of work
Review: Less than a year after its publication, W G Sebald's "Austerlitz" is already being hailed as a modern masterpiece, one of those literary heavyweights that make such an indelible impression on critics and writers they're almost guaranteed a place on the "must read" list of future generations of literature students. I can see why. While likely to appeal mostly to serious readers - it certainly won't be cannon fodder for the youth or bestsellers market - "Austerlitz" isn't inaccessible or especially difficult for the persevering. Admittedly, the novel gets off to a slow start. The first hundred pages or so is packed with so much detail about places and objects you wonder at the point of these interminably dry passages, but once the unnamed narrator gets going, the long flowing sentences start to reveal a subtle and poetic rhythmn that brightens the character Austerlitz's confessional.

Austerlitz's unhappy childhood with his adoptive parents in England isn't the cause of his unsettled mind. It's the absence of memory - of his natural parents, their life together, their history and their fate - that has created this large hole he needs desperately to fill. There is a passage about homing pidgeons in there that perfectly encapsulates the novel's theme of the indestructability of identity and the futility of obliterating one's past.

"Austerlitz" reads like a black and white silent movie about the Holocaust years. There are no torrid scenes of Jews being gassed in chambers or roasted over flames, only ghostly images of derelict buildings and ash grey landscape to denote the pitilessness of the times. Sebald's semi-documentary approach is made all the more deliberate by the use of b&w pictures of people, places, artifacts and landscape - all anonymous and unannotated - that produces a curiously distancing effect, suggesting perhaps an alignment of the general with the particular in the telling of the character Austerlitz's history.

"Austerlitz" is an important and scholarly piece of fictional writing. For serious readers only.

Rating:
Summary: A deeply disingenous writer
Review: Austerlitz is a heavy and self-important and clumsy and unrepentantly dull novel written by a deeply disingenuous writer.

Rating:
Summary: Obviously the whole book got lost in the translation
Review: I managed to tough it out until page 160 but by then I had all I could stands and I couldn't stands no more.

Rating:
Summary: How do squirrels know where they've buried their horde?
Review: Austerlitz is a negative, an undeveloped film of memory swished around in the fluid of the reader's imagination, from which emerge images at once clear and indistinct. Readers familiar with Sebald's work will recognize ideas and techniques in the first part of this book - the seemingly random historical associations, the beautifully dense and allusive sentence structures, the haunting photos that poetically omit more than they include - but as the narrative progresses, shadows of the Nazi holocaust take form and lead us deeper into the inferno. The emotional distance and intellectual reluctance start to make sense - they not only characterize the narrator, but they enhance our sense of his human frailty. I kept wondering what kind of book this was - a memoir, a thinly veiled confession, or a fiction of remarkable power? The patterns and connections suggested a literary invention, but every element rang true and seemed idiosyncratically real. The author's death also lends a note of finality and definition to this evocative work, making it necessarily Sebald's last word on recurring themes. If you've not read any of his other books, this is still a fine place to start, because each demands rereading in the context of the whole. For a while his books just play on in your memory, yet when you pick them up again they are full of surprises and undiscovered gems. I recommend getting the hardcover copy so that the binding can stand up to repeated reference.

Rating:
Summary: A Question
Review: May I ask a question? Many of the things that haunted the character Austerlitz were later found by him to be places, buildings, and shapes that he had seen as a young boy, prior to his escape.

But some of the haunting things had only been seen or experienced by his mother, correct? The young boy never saw Theresienstadt, according to the narrative, thus wouldn't have known anything about the shape of the architecture there - and yet it obsessed him until he went there and saw it for the first time. I need to read it again, but can someone comment?

Rating:
Summary: memory's train
Review: One does not -- indeed, one cannot -- sum up a work by W.G. Sebald, without losing an essential part of its meaning and effect. Like "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn," "Austerlitz" is also a work in which memory is the breath that animates and connects the seemingly disparate stories, gallery of random photos, scientific facts, and historical accounts into a literary pattern that reinvents writing.

At the beginning of the book, the nameless narrator, who is in transit, (as are all the nameless narrators in Sebald's books) starts a conversation in the railway station in Antwerp with a man named Austerlitz. This mostly one-sided exchange lasts some 30 years.

In the first part of the book, the discussion centers on architecture, specifically on the structural remnants of projects that recall ambitious attempts at social engineering, but which, in Sebald's prose, now stand out as relics of the folly that inspired them. Austerlitz, who is without a first name in the early years of this extended conversation -- as if he were not fully a person yet -- relates to the world around him through the study of architecture, books, and the photos he keeps, and this is what he shares with us through the narrator.

As the narrator and Austerlitz keep on meeting, Austerlitz's character takes on ever more personality in the recollections, first of a Welsh childhood spent with emotionally distant foster parents, then, later, in accounts of his years of coming into a life of his own in boarding school.

After finishing his studies, Austerlitz lives a life in which books and architecture feature prominently, but just as he settles down to gather his collection of writings, photos, and research into a book, he experiences a breakdown. In this state, language, which Austerlitz compares to "an old city full of streets, and squares, nooks and crannies," fails him completely and he finds himself wandering the streets of London at odd hours. During his wanderings, in an abandoned part of an Underground station he has a flashback of arriving there as a four year old. From here on, the book takes on a lyrical, almost luminous turn, as Austerlitz recovers his past in Prague and so acquires a first name.

The last part of the book takes us to Paris and gives us a complex take on the relationship between the "gare d'Austerlitz" and the towers of the new Bibliotheque Nationale. On the surface, Austerlitz seems to be telling the story of his search for his father throughout the streets of Paris and in the archives of the new colossal library, which, to him "is inimical to human beings, and runs counter, on principle, ... , to the requirements of any true reader." But, in fact, Austerlitz's account of the Babylonian library and his descriptions of the ornate iron work of the Austerlitz railway station frames what lies between and beneath these two structures -- one a repository of knowledge and culture, the other a metaphor for motion and change. For it was here, under the library's soaring towers, that, during World War II, the Germans, with the help of the French, "brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris," and sorted it according to elaborate schemes of categories and procedures.

Here, under what is now the library, people were once divested not only of their things, but also of an identity -- the kind of self-knowledge that is born from the intricate and long dance between people and the objects with which they fill their environment. Here also, and on a different scale, these same things lost something essential in this process of systematic classification and sorting.

For Austerlitz, under this soaring library lie the marshes of memory and history. Here the poignant particulars of the everyday life of a group of people were lost. Here they also remain invisible from that bird's eye perspective from the library, as they do in the mist of the sooty clouds of smoke that rise from locomotives -- those quintessential metaphors for the engine that drove the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism.

As a writer, Sebald moves us -- even as we are moving along with his narrator, whether on foot, on train, or in the air -- by helping us see, whether from the lofty heights of libraries or in the close-up of a photo, that which lies buried or sunken in the burnt-out fields of memory. Sebald's genius is in the way in which he uses his writing to excavate the foundations of the soul -- as we have come to understand that notion in the twentieth century.

Rating:
Summary: Just as I was about to give up.........
Review: As other reviewers have stated this can be a difficult book to read. The author's style, which is to ignore stylistic standards really did not cause me any pause. The difficulty was in his incredible but complex prose. Throughout the entire book, I felt that I was only picking up the surface meaning and that repeated readings would reveal several more layers.

After reading approximately 1/3 of the book, I was ready to give up. However, at this point the novel began to detail Austerlitz's search for his identity. Austerlitz's journey to Prague drew me in, increased the pace of my reading and held my interest until the end. Will I read it again and discover what cannot be found by a single reading? Only time will tell.

This is not a book for everyone. You have to be patient. If you read for simple entertainment, forget it. It was a true intellectual exercise and one I am glad I partook of.

Rating:
Summary: A gem
Review: In one of literature's most unique embellishments, Sebald has given us a consuming, rapturous novel that consists of three paragraphs. Three. An average of 100 pages per paragraph. And the demarcations between paragraphs are not even significant or enlightening.
The frame of the story is a series of conversations between the narrator, never identified and nothing more than a conduit for the story, and Austerlitz, man who the narrator first encounters by chance at a train station in Belgium. Over the course of the next 30 years, the two occasionally meet again, sometimes serendipitously, sometimes planned, over the course of many years. Through these conversations we first learn that Austerlitz is an unknown man. Indeed the first 150 pages wraps us into his professional world of architecture and its permutations in various parts of Europe as well as his recantation of early life in a Welsh countryside and education in England. Gradually however, Austerlitz confides in his most sacred secret: his true origins as a beneficiary of the kinder transport, the system by which Jews of Eastern Europe secreted their children from their homes into waiting arms of families in Britain during the latter part of the 30s.
It is Austerlitz own journey of discovery back to Czechoslovakia that is the highlight of the story. He has always felt a bit incomplete, as if something in his past has not come with him to adulthood and thru chance circumstance and a bit of detective work, he discovers that his biological mother and father lived in Prague and had given him to the transport in 1939 when he was 4 1/2 years old. His search to bridge this link to his past and give himself a true picture of his origin holds the reader's interest throughout his dogged pursuit of answers. Some of the history shows itself with clarity and zeal, other detail has become obscured and lost in the march of time. However, the journey gives Austerlitz a sense of belonging and though the thought of his parent's probable fate can never be swallowed, he is a stronger man at greater peace with himself and his surroundings.
While the structure of Austerlitz can be unnerving to many and this will undoubtedly lose some readers, its continuity brings a palpable connectedness to the story. While many books would have carved this story into two or three distinct parts, Sebald wants us to see how history shapes and molds the present and the unending paragraphs do this with vibrant authority. We are easily and seamlessly drawn to Austerlitz' past and it brings the reader much closer to the emotions that must be present in the title character. For a book that is molded from a very simple frame, multiple conversations between two people, Austerlitz is riveting and in may ways, delivers us to a deeper perspective than lesser books strive for. A worthy read.

Rating:
Summary: Temps perdu
Review: They don't get much better than this.
I noticed when I started this book that it is a translation done by Anthea Bell, but this may in itself be just a literary device, or the author must have worked very closely with the author. How else could he, or she, or both have achieved such beautiful English prose. Truly enviable. I am glad to see that one reviewer talked about the texture of the prose in terms of music, and he is right on the mark. Everything is in a minor key and the general tonality and pacing contribute richly to the darkness of the narrative, which is indeed dark. The main theme seems to be how easily if unwillingly we tend to fall from life into death. And almost, sometimes, back again.

Austerlitz tells his story to an unnamed narrator. He was brought up in Wales by a fanatic but civilized preacher and his marginally functional wife but as an adolescent discovers his true origins lie elsewhere. Most of the book deals with his attempt to learn about his beginnings and his parents, victims of Nazi genocide.

The book's fascinating structure is built on descriptions of European train stations and other public buildings, most notably the new National Library in Paris which Austerlitz considers (and by any reasonalbe accounting is) an abomination built on hostility to readers and their search for understanding. Yes, I have visited it.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has despaired of finding high literary standards in contemporary writing.