Synopses & Reviews
Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers stops across England and Europe, W.G. Sebalds unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitzs ongoing efforts to understand who he is. An orphan who came to England alone in the summer of 1939 and was raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife as their own, Austerlitz grew up with no conscious memory of where he came from.
W.G. Sebald embodies in Austerlitz the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the minds defenses against trauma. Along the way, this novel of many riches dwells magically on a variety of subjects -- railway architecture, military fortifications; insets, plants, and animals; the constellations; works of art; the strange contents of the museum of a veterinary school; a small circus; and the three capital cities that loom over the book, London, Paris, and Prague -- in the service of its astounding vision.
About the Author
W. G. Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming Professor of European Literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His three previous books won several international awards, including the L.A. Times Book Award for fiction, the Berlin Literature Prize and the Literatur Nord Prize. W. G. Sebald was killed in a car accident at age 57 in December 2001.
Reading Group Guide
1. In what ways can Sebalds work be said to create a new genre? Do we know whether to take
Austerlitz as fact or fiction?
2. Why do you suppose Sebald incorporates photographs into his work? To what effect?
3. Where does the name Jacques Austerlitz come from? Why do you think Sebald chose it?
4. What is the relationship between past and present throughout the book? What tricks does Sebald play with the passage of time? What does Austerlitz have to say on his experience of time?
5. What sort of mood does Sebalds use of language create throughout the novel? How does Sebalds language function in the same way that character and plot do in a more traditional novel?
6. Some critics have called attention to Sebalds wan sense of humor-a “low-key gallows humor.” What examples of this humor can you find in the book?
7. What type of architecture most appeals to Austerlitz? What do you make of this fascination?
8. Various animals appear throughout the novel. What does the novel make of the relationships between humans and other creatures, and between all animals-humans included-and their environment? How do animals in the novel orient themselves, and what does it mean, throughout, to become literally dis-oriented?
9. What does the novel have to say about the minds defenses against great trauma?
10. At the novels end, Austerlitz tells the narrator of a Jewish cemetery located just behind his house in London, behind a wall, whose existence hed only discovered during his last days in the city. How does the discovery of the cemetery replicate Austerlitzs discovery of his heritage, and what does this link suggest about the connection between physical artifacts and the workings of memory? In what way could it be said that this cemeterys presence in the novel honors the durability of the world of European Jewry that Nazi Germany attempted to expunge?