Winfried Georg Sebald

Jacques Austerlitz, an orphan refugee child who arrived in London in 1939 and was raised by a Methodist minister, struggles to understand who he is as he moves through his life. 35,000 first printing.

Austerlitz

W.G. Sebald

Anthea Bell

In the summer of 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on one of the Kindertransports and placed with foster parents in Wales. For reasons of their own, the childless Calvinist couple erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity. Throughout his life Austerlitz is haunted by feelings of otherness, but it is not until retirement that he embarks on a journey to make sense of his curious early memories and explores what happened to him half a century ago.

A challenging read but beautifully written. 

Tom Koss

Erfan Abedi

This was the first fiction book I've managed to finish since Mar. 4th, 2017. And that mere fact speaks volumes about the power of the dead, the absorbed, the quarantine we're in, or something to that effect.

As I'm not the literate man I once used to be, all I can say about Austerlitz at the time is that surprisingly it seemed to reference a huge amount of out-of-subject and certainly inconsistent matters that have happened in my own life. (for those aquatinted, a minor example would be the summer of 92 and RENT FREE)

Austerlitz resonated with me because it constantly made me want to stare into the abyss as I usually do, looking at even the simplest and most minor of details, desperately seeking a sense of meaning and everlasting life. e.g. the scene where Austerlitz encounters the squirrel toy.

It also reminded me of all the times I visited historic sites or museums, saying "well someone put a lot of effort into this, but then what?" and always feeling like the Persians or Greeks were coming to life in front of my eyes just wandering about and going on with their labour, having zero to answer.

Overall, the sense of being lost that's predominant within the book has been something that I've often experienced; mostly after finishing a thing that had occupied my mind for quite a while, when it was time to "leave it in the past": "now what?"
One has all the good reasons to get sick over this question, because it never leaves one. You create and put effort and do a huge amount of work and then leave it to the dead until you're left to the dead.

Lily

I have only once read something that came a tad close to resembling (albeit highhandedly and in a childishly indulgent manner, suitable for its audience) Sebald’s captivating narrative style, blending photographs and words, and it was among my favorite books from childhood, The Series of Unfortunate Events, by Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) [among the billions of literary references in there, of course]; In particular, the companion book of the series, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. In that book, Handler blurs the line between fiction and fact in an unsettling manner, by juxtaposing mysterious circumstances with photos of unknown strangers from 1930s, introducing them as the characters of his universe. At all times, even though the reader knows what he/she is reading is certainly fictional, an uneasy sense of wonder and uncertainty washes over the mind, surrounding everything with a blue mist. This, I am now certain, was something Handler learnt from the works of W. G. Sebald; an author whose surname Handler gave to one of his characters, as an homage (the character of Dr. Gustav Sebald).     
Austerlitz is among the most beautiful books I have read. Apart from the story, the narrative style and prose kept me wishing I was capable of creating something, anything, like this, and this is not a thought that occurs to me frequently (or at all, frankly) when I read a book. It goes much beyond the weary melancholy and wistful tone; Reading Austerlitz is a disorienting experience, but in an entirely different way than reading most unconventional works of high-modernist and post-modernist fiction. The disorienting quality of Sebald’s narrative style stems from the ever-present sense of uncertainty as to what it even is that we are reading, from the flickering and fragile nature of his characters, from the displaced gothic sentiments weaved into hard historic themes and set pieces, the anti-Proustian probing into a past that threatens to strangle the characters, instead of calming them. Sebald writes on concrete historical events, on buildings and monuments, on fortresses and museums, and yet, more and more as one follows his words, the story seems less alive. I say “alive” because it is not the sense of “unreality” that makes the experience of reading Austerlitz so haunting, but the sense of death, of passing, of specters walking us by, smiling at us, touching our hands, caressing our faces. 

The novel’s main character, Jacques Austerlitz, is raised by a taciturn Calvinist family in a Welsh foster home during the 1940s. During this period, he thinks his name is Dafydd Elias, and seems to remember almost nothing of his true origins. Austerlitz feels alienated from his new family and surroundings. Through coincidence, he retains dim memories of an earlier life, and spends his twilight years unraveling the mystery of his own existence, descending into a hell he absentmindedly erased from his mind as a child, tracing the path that leads him back to his childhood in Czechoslovakia and the dark fate of his parents at the hands of Nazis.

Dealing with such horrific themes as the human cost of Holocaust is only one aspect that gives the book its spectral quality; it is ever present. In the old and dark buildings and places the characters constantly find themselves in, in the romantic quest to find one’s true self and origin, in the enigmatic and strange relationship the book seems to have with the concept of “time”, the haunting of present by the historical events of recent past, and in Sebald’s particular prose. Geoff Dyer, in an essay on Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, writes:

The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald’s books is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote—as was often remarked—like a ghost. He was one of the most innovative writers of the late twentieth century, and yet part of this originality derived from the way his prose felt exhumed from the nineteenth.

But perhaps the most lingering aspect, is the presence of the photographs in the book. In the poignant introduction written by James Wood, he describes this particular phenomenon:     
As Roland Barthes rightly says in his book Camera Lucida, a book with which Austerlitz is in deep dialogue, photographs shock us because they so finally represent what has been. We look at most old photographs and we think: “that person is going to die, and is in fact now dead.” Barthes calls photographers “agents of death,” because they freeze the subject and the moment into finitude. Over photographs, he writes, we shudder as over a catastrophe that has already occurred: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

The fact that the photographs Sebald uses to represent his characters do not really belong to his characters —they are fictional, after all— intensifies the spectral effect. Who are these people, staring at us, piercing us with their gaze? We want to believe that the little boy on the cover of the book is, in fact, Jacques Austerlitz, but alas, there is no Jacques Austerlitz; Who is the boy, then? Juxtaposing such fictional representations with actual representations (photographs of real buildings and places that we know to exist) only heightens the sense of enigma and loss, taking us in and out of a reality that is blurred masterfully, letting us touch the characters with shaky fingertips, only to lose them at last as we are pushed into a void outside of time and space. The boy is someone, lost to history, lost to us, a ghost.

Jacques Austerlitz heißt der rätselhafte Fremde, den der Erzähler einst in einer dunklen Bahnhofshalle kennen lernte. Als der Zufall die beiden Männer wieder zusammenführt, enthüllt sich Schritt für Schritt die Lebensgeschichte dieses schwermütigen Wanderers. Austerlitz, der seit vielen Jahren in London lebt, ist kein Engländer. In den vierziger Jahren ist er als jüdisches Flüchtlingskind nach Wales gekommen. Der Junge wächst bei einem Prediger und seiner Frau heran, und als er nach vielen Jahren seine wahre Herkunft erfährt, weiß er, warum er sich als Fremder unter den Menschen fühlt. W. G. Sebald verfolgt in seinem Roman die Geschichte eines Entwurzelten, der keine Heimat mehr finden kann.

Sabine Delorme

Abandoned after 265 pages. Beautiful language, strangely mesmerizing I really enjoyed the first 120 pages, but it’s becoming unbearably boring. Two old man talk about things, women don’t seem to exist or are withering away after a few chapters. And I really really hate not having paragraphs or chapters.

From one of the undisputed masters of world literature, a haunting novel of sublime ambition and power about a man whose fragmentary memories of a lost childhood lead him on a quest across Europe in search of his heritage. Jacques Austerlitz is a survivor – rescued as a child from the Nazi threat. In the summer of 1939 he arrives in Wales to live with a Methodist minister and his wife. As he grows up, they tell him nothing of his origins, and he reaches adulthood with no understanding of where he came from. Late in life, a sudden memory brings him the first glimpse of his origins, launching him on a journey into a family history that has been buried. The story of Jacques Austerlitz unfolds over the course of a 30-year conversation that takes place in train stations and travellers’ stops across England and Europe. In Jacques Austerlitz, Sebald embodies the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the mind’s defences against trauma. Along the way, this novel of many riches dwells magically on a variety of subjects – railway architecture, military fortifications, insects, plants and animals, the constellations, works of art, a small circus and the three cities that loom over the book, London, Paris and Prague – in the service of its astounding vision. From the Hardcover edition.

Austerlitz

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