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
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.
1. In what ways can Sebald’s 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 Sebald’s use of language create throughout the novel? How does Sebald’s language function in the same way that character and plot do in a more traditional novel?
6. Some critics have called attention to Sebald’s 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 mind’s defenses against great trauma?
10. At the novel’s end, Austerlitz tells the narrator of a Jewish cemetery located just behind his house in London, behind a wall, whose existence he’d only discovered during his last days in the city. How does the discovery of the cemetery replicate Austerlitz’s 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 cemetery’s presence in the novel honors the durability of the world of European Jewry that Nazi Germany attempted to expunge?