Customer Reviews

Austerlitz.

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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!

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.

Those of us who love Sebald's writing, love it passionately. I don't think this is an author with whom you can take a middle-of-the-road stance. Either you can't stand his books, or you adore them. I happen to adore them and feel very saddened that Austerlitz must be his last.

I think many people are put off by Sebald's long sentences, which can go on for two or three pages or more, as well as his long paragraphs that can go on for forty or fifty pages or more. If they are, they shouldn't be. Sebald wrote beautiful, crystalline prose and his books are surprisingly easy to read.

Sebald's books are not conventionally plotted, nor should they be. They are not conventional stories but meditations, revelations, evocations and elegies instead. They end up asking more questions than they answer and, in that way, they stay with you and become a part of you more than most conventionally plotted works ever do.

Austerlitz, my favorite Sebald work, is set in various train stations across Europe and chronicles a series of conversations that take place over a thirty year period. These conversations take place between the narrator of the book (who is never named) and a fellow traveler (Austerlitz) whom the narrator first encounters in the main train station in Antwerp, Belgium.

The book is slow to start, but gradually, we learn more and more about the mysterious Austerlitz. A native of Prague, Austerlitz learns from his nanny that he was sent out of that city (by train) prior to the arrival of the Nazis. Hence, train stations become very important to him for, in a sense, they symbolize his very survival.

A student of architecture, Austerlitz immediately captivates the narrator with his lectures on that subject as well as on art, time and various other subjects. As their friendship deepens and grows, the narrator learns that Austerlitz feels a deep void in the center of his soul that he cannot seem to fill and that it is this void that has spawned his desire to learn, to know. For in knowing about other things, Austerlitz hopes to one day find out who he, himself, really is.

Although this book is not broken up into chapters, Sebald, as in his three previous novels, has used photographs to accompany the text. These photographs, which Austerlitz analyzes in the hope of learning something new about himself, also serve as stopping points for the reader.

Austerlitz is a brilliant and beautiful meditation about time and memory, about how memory is preserved and how it is destroyed. About the preservation of life in memory's presence and the presence of death in its absence.

The characters in Austerlitz, as well as the characters in Sebald's previous novels, try very hard to keep memory alive. They do not want the strand of the past to disintegrate and leave them feeling disoriented.

The pace of Austerlitz is perfect...just like the pace one feels when traveling by train, at least in Europe. There is the rush through the station to catch the train and find one's seat, then the slow and easy pace once the train pulls out and begins its journey.

There is something ephemeral about this book, just as there should be. After all, time and memory are both ephemeral and fleeting and this is a book about both. Austerlitz is an eloquent, elegant and beautiful book. It is a book deserving to read by anyone who loves beautiful prose.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a book to read in one go, in total privacy and quiet and plenty of time. I had all three and am heartily glad. It takes plenty of concentration, immersion even.

Sebald assumes his reader is intelligent with a good memory, he explains things just once and relies on you to understand it and remember it at the right time. What a treat!

The long sentences and paragraphs aren't at all difficult, which is extraordinary since they were written in German and translated. Hats off to both writer and translator. They build up as you go to a beautiful rhythm, though I suspected they'd lost something from the original German.

Unfortunately the edition I read didn't translate any of the non-German (French, Czech); with my schoolgirl French and non-existent Czech, I hope I didn't miss some important stuff.

The passage about the nature of time was breathtaking, summing up the swirling eddies of the book's structure. The way he layers time upon time, memory upon memory, each echoing and amplifying each other. Sigh. I really felt it couldn't be fiction; was it? Probably. He's just that good a writer.

The section on writer's block was bleak, it seemed it came from personal experience, how words and sentences were stripped of their meaning.

I don't think I've read many books with that much impact, so much substance and so much incredible skill. Other writers could take one of the ideas and write a whole book.

I will definitely reread it several times as I'm sure much of its subtlety will reveal itself more fully.

I honestly can't think of anything I've read lately that's better.