Austerlitz (Modern Library (Paperback))

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.

Raised by foster parents in Wales, the narrator, as an adult, discovers his true name and origin and uncovers the fate of his parents. Some of the passages are brilliantly stated.For instance,triggered by moths flying around a lamplight - "... the sudden inclusion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them." p 931"We are not alone in dreaming at night for...perhaps moths dream as well, perhaps a lettue in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night." p. 94"We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious." p. 134"... as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles taht we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played i your former lives." p.182"... we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaced interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead..." p. 185"At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life." p. 212"...reinforced the suspicion I had always entertained that the border between life and death is less impermeable than we commonly think..." p. 283"It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must gov there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time..." pp. 257-258

Absolutely fascinating and memorable

Extraordinaria novela. No es para aquellos que buscan lecturas fáciles pues su formato es de un post-modernismo impresionante. Pero, con pasajes inolvidables.

It arrived on time and in good condition

Beautifully written/translated narrative that draws the reader in to its devastating conclusion.

AusterlitzA must read for anyone interested in the far reaching effects of wartime Europe.Sebald is also capable of brilliant insight into human nature related to natural, architectural and material experience.