Austerlitz

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Adrien-Alice, January 18, 2010 (view all comments by Adrien-Alice)
What to say about this book? It's the only Sebald I've read, so I don't have much to compare it to. It's amazing, and only got better as its very first-person pattern got more distinct, as my brain went from present to past to future past, spiraling around the details that, if they don't quite add up to a personality, add up to a life.

One of the most persuasive evocations of what the Holocaust can mean, how it can be approached. The book is an accumulation of fact and artifacts, not plot or even really events, and eventually as a reader you come to realize that the distance between the objects the narrator has accumulatedand the meaning they had for the people who used to own them is the exact distance of understanding the holocaust, the impossible thing I feel like this book manages to hint at how to do.

It's the kind of book that splits me--do I suspend myself in the beauty of its attempts at the inexpressible or do I hurtle myself towards trying to penetrate it and parse it out, because maybe its beauty is in its reconstituted self as well?

Clear your afternoon and your evening as well. And then give it to someone you're interested in knowing better and talk about it.

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Andrew Daily, April 4, 2007 (view all comments by Andrew Daily)
Theodor Adorno once speculated whether there could be any art after Auschwitz. After having stared deep into the abyss, was there enough light left for humanity to stagger forward? Was beauty still possible and the sublime still accessible?

Primo Levi's books on his experience immediately put paid to that speculation by rediscovering humanity in the struggle against horror, whether through the occasional instances of solidarity between victims or the overwhelming resilience of Levi himself in resisting annihilation. Sebald's books continue this tradition: attempting to discover what enables men and women to keep on going in the face of, or haunted by the memory of, unspeakable horror.

Austerlitz tells the story of a man who wanders across Europe searching for his true origins. A beneficiary of the 'kindertransport' - the organized evacuation of Jewish babies from Central Europe to 'safe' Western European homes - Austerlitz works to uncover the fate of his family. His search stands in for Europe's collective difficulty in dealing with its past.

Sebald's style is spare and crystalline; his works of fiction resemble works of non-fiction, puncuated by his own status as the narrator of his fictions, and buttressed by the pictures that accompany the text, underlining his observations with visual evidence. The book is achingly beautiful and expresses a style of comportment, current among many intellectuals, a melancholy, that Americans frequently misinterpret as weakness, but is ultimately thoughtful and memorial, facing fully up to Europe's 'dark century.'

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780375756566

Author:

Sebald, W. G.

Publisher:

Modern Library

Author:

Sebald, Winfried Georg

Location:

New York

Subject:

General

Subject:

Historical fiction

Subject:

Holocaust, jewish

Subject:

General Fiction

Subject:

Literature-A to Z

Copyright:

2001

Edition Number:

1st U.S. paperback e

Edition Description:

Trade paper

Series:

Modern Library Paperbacks

Series Volume:

GTR-184

Publication Date:

September 3, 2002

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Grade Level:

General/trade

Language:

English

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

304

Dimensions:

7.9 x 5.12 x .6 in .5 lb