Austerlitz

Rating:
Summary: Like a faded photograph
Review: A moving exploration of memory and loss, set in modern Europe against the backdrop of the Holocaust.

Austerlitz, the title character, tells his story to the faceless narrator. He talks of his life as a child refugee in England, his (un?) conscious effort to bury his memories, indeed all of his past, and then his frantic efforts to pull back the shades when he is in his sixties. The story is told in fragments, without a clear chronology, and is supported with small black and white photographs, the residue that is all that remains in the ashes of the war.

There is no real plot, and no real resolution - the book's meaning, I think, is to relate the process of memory, and the way our past forms who we are, even when we have no real knowledge of it. Sebald looks at time, and loss, and life, and comments more than once on the abrupt transition from life to death. He balances that fragility with an obsession with our monuments, the massive forts, train stations and libraries that span centuries. We are ghosts, I think I hear him saying, even while we're living.

But it's the photographs that are the book's strongest metaphor. Like a photograph, our memories are subject to different readings, they reveal more detail on close examination, the secrets are often hidden in the shadows - and like photographs, they fade.

Rating:
Summary: Read and Remember
Review: In sharing my adoration of Austerlitz with a friend, I found it hard to extrapolate a single quote, every description, feeling, idea is so interconnected to everything else, the novel defies extraction... perhaps that's why there are no paragraphs, just prose with literally about six subtle indentations indicating a break, plus pictures(mostly black and white photos of stark moments, rigid portraiture, haunting architecture, luminous detritus from the past and present...future?). It's a masterpiece about memory and repression, isolation and history, architecture and humanity, intense study and madness, the holocaust and rail transit. It's as much about the characters as it is about the reader. If read in an open, meandering, dreamlike, mind-state, it has the potential of taking the reader on his/her own journey through the tangled cryptic mesh of memory. And like Phillip K. Dick(though in an entirely different vein, but not all that different when you get down to it) and others, Sebald offers the idea that all time, the past, future, and now, exist simultaneously. Just plain good.

Sebald lives on in the images of dim radiance he leaves the reader with. He lives on in the glimmers of light he ignites in the hallows of memory. Like the dreadful histories he unearths, he'll always remain, a fortification guarding truth.

Rating:
Summary: R.I.P. Herr Sebald
Review: The man who brought us such moving books as this and whose trips throughout his books were often on trains or walking was tragically killed in a car accident. I can only say he is a must read. Often writing about the aftermath of World War 2 his voice was also millennial in it existential dread.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Loss in the World of Literature
Review: The literary/intellectual world has lost one of its more scintillating stars, when W.G. Sebald, spurred by a heart attack, ran his car into an oncoming traffic and died last week. He was 57 years old. I still haven't recovered fully from the news, since this man's work has deeply influenced my thoughts and the way I read.

'Austerlitz', then, is a beautiful swansong. It is eminently more accessible than his previous books, 'The Emigrants', 'The Rings of Saturn', and 'Vertigo'. It is not to say that Austerlitz is any less ruminative than his earlier work, but there's more of a divested narrative thrust in Austerlitz, and it makes for a breezier (can any Sebald work be 'breezy'?) reading (although Sebald altogether does away with paragraphs and chapters for the most part).

The translation by Anthea Bell... I haven't made up my mind about it. Michael Hulse had translated Sebald's earlier books (published by New Directions), and although Bell's translation seems sonorous and good, some of the tough, intransigent lyricism of Hulse's translation seems to be missing here.

If you're interested in reading Sebald, definitely start with this haunting novel. Sebald does harrowing things with themes of memory and identity, never giving into portraying the horrors of history with broad, sentimental brushstrokes as many storytellers tend to do.

After 'Austerlitz', 'The Emigrants' should be a good follow up read. Then 'The Rings'... and 'Vertigo'.

There's a book of Sebald that is supposed to come out next year on Germany's participation in the WWII that was criticized by many Germans as being too... well, as being too starkly honest.
There is one more unpublished novel that is on its way to publication next year in the states (already published in Germany under the title, "Luftkrieg").

I only wonder if there will be any writer in the near future who will speak so eloquently about the act of remembering. Could anyone summon the ghost of Sebald one day, the way Sebald himself had conjured so magically and unforgettably, the spirit of Kafka? One can only wish.

Rating:
Summary: Where can Sebald go from here?
Review: Austerlitz is another Sebald travelogue into sadness, deeper yet more lustrous than his previous books. The narrator carries on his own explorations of the monuments of Europe's tragedies as he periodically meets and hears the story of Austerlitz, who is on a quest for lost family and identity. Both make huge spiraling forays and speak quietly of losses of identity and even civilization, and overgrowths of the crass and brutish. The language is level and understated - itself shocking in these times - and does not draw attention to the intricacies of the links between threads. At the end Austerlitz leaves the narrator in Gare Austerlitz, on the trail of his lost father, and the narrator heads back to Belgian fortifications he explored at the beginning of the book with horror, like Anna Liffey recirculating in Joyce. Both men, we feel, are taking their leave into each their own abyss.

Sebald tours grief, loss and disintegration with steady composure, with clarity and grace, with photos like milestones at which we pause for the view ahead and behind, entranced, apalled, we want to hold his hand, don't leave us, go on talking.

Can Sebald re-surface after this? He must be exhausted.

I was thinking of editing my review to rescind the pessimistic conclusion, when I saw the note by 5-cent haircut, to whom thanks, the note of Sebald's death. Oh damn. Another grief to grieve. I discovered Sebald just after the death of my great friend and mentor, and grieved not ever taking my kids to meet him, and then not being able to introduce him to Sebald. The losses of 2001!

Because Sebald was not finished, as I suggested above. Austerlitz will play its themes over and over through your reflections. I had just realized that, contrary to the "where can he (Sebald) go from here", that he (Austerlitz) was moving out on a new venture that, while leaving the narrator stuck in his helical horrors, his departure to look for his father and the lover he had previously lost, are a resolute striking out for hope, not (necessarily) the last charge, as it felt to me at first.

You will reread Austerlitz often, entire, in random burrowings, or seeking a passage for the chords of your current mood. And you will find many books in Austerlitz. Now it is a swan song, as I intimated it might be; but it was not necessarily so; and I am deeply grieved.

Can we give him another star?

Rating:
Summary: Addictive
Review: I have become addicted to W.G. Sebald as he opens the world to me on every page. His writings make me explore my own inter feelings and thoughts. In Austerlitz I things he has done so more than any other of his wonderful masterpieces.To me the importance of our individualty seemed to be so much of what makes this book and our lifes valid.At one point Sebald writes,I had for a good while been watching the toilers in the city gold mines as they came to meet at their wartering hole early in the evening all of them identical in their dark blue suits, striped shirts, and gaudy ties, and as I tried to grasp the mysterious habits of the members of this species, which is not to be found in any beastiary-their preferance for crowding close together, their semi-gregarious, semi-aggressive demeanor, the way they put their throats back in emptying their glasses, the increasingly excitable babble of their voices the sudden hasty departure of one or another of them. At another point Sebald says;I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintergration of the personality,I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world.If someone had come then to lead me away to place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without so much as opening my eyes,...As you read Sebald's wonderful proust like prose and he finds inspiration in the most unexpected places,you wonder did the German Reich take Austerlitz parents away like they took away peoples individuality ? Just as all the people involved in this terrible deed did so by depersonlizing a people.

Rating:
Summary: A Truly Excellent Book
Review: I've enjoyed W.G. Sebald's other books but this one is at the top. It works on so many levels. The stream of consciousness writing style flows so perfectly from one vignette to the next. It is a pleasure to read. Second, there is so much going on in this book. It defines "multi-layered." But at the same time, "Austerlitz" is not all about the writing style. The story manages to be emotional, historical, and just generally compelling.

I tend to be disappointed by a lot of fiction, but this work is one that will be read and re-read for many years.

Rating:
Summary: Who are we if our past is taken from us?
Review: Seemingly out of the blue, Sebald has delivered another utterly unique creation. "Austerlitz" is a haunting meditation on the mystery of identity, the passing of time, and the interconnectedness of experience. The Sebaldian digressions are as fascinating as the Sebaldian coincidences are unsettling. A German who knows only too well the German obsession with itemizing, accounting, and tidying up, Sebald succeeds in demonstrating like no other writer I know the unspeakable orderliness and cruelty of the Final Solution. He does so by example, focusing on the life of a Czech orphan who grows up in a foster home in Wales. There is much about the book that is poignant and sad, but nothing that is sentimental.

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: A great achievement
Review: Two men meet in a train station and discuss architectural history. You note a sense of malaise in the narrator, of whom all we know is academic ties and German nationality, and a curious rootlessness in the character of Austerlitz, named after the locale of the Napoleonic battle. They meet repeatedly by strange "chance," and as Austerlitz's discourse progresses from the historical and aesthetic to the personal, vanished people begin to emerge from the cityscape. As you glimpse them, you are hit by a slow wave of realization--of the impact of the kindertransport on one child; of the disassociation that great human crimes leave in our minds and language; of the transience not only of human individuals but of whole peoples; and of the transformation of human creations over time. This is a subtle, big-hearted, careful, exquisite, important book.