Austerlitz

In the five years since his books began to appear in translation, W.G. Sebald, a Bavarian-born academic who lives in East Anglia, has become one of England's most influential novelists — and (with the help of his translators) the source of some of that country's best prose in years: direct, precise, literary without an ounce of self-regard. In German, it is said that Sebald's writing sounds old-fashioned. Here, where he is better known, Sebald has been experienced as a liberator of realist fiction.

It's easy to dwell on Sebald's prose style because, until now, he has written novels without much in the way of plot: extended romantic essays that wander (in the mind of an unnamed narrator who seems in many ways to be Sebald) across Europe and into the corners of history, encountering one tale after another of exile and dispossession.

Austerlitz, Sebald's fourth novel, is his most approachable work to date. It is a novel in the traditional sense. It has a plot, although it takes a long time to get under way: A young expatriate German (call him "Sebald," although, as in all Sebald's books, the narrator always avoids mentioning his name)traveling in Belgium in the late 1960s notices a backpacker sketching the interior of the Antwerp train station. Intrigued, Sebald introduces himself, and the two men fall into a conversation that continues for months, over a series of chance encounters. Their talks range from the lethal gases released in the manufacture of Victorian mirrors, to the iconography of Masonic temples, to the obsolete science of city-fortification. Between these encounters, Sebald meditates on Nazi war crimes in Belgium, his own childhood terror of the butcher shop, and the linguistic field work performed in the Brazilian rain forest by an Italian survivor of Dachau: "His main subject, depicted again and again in different forms and compositions...was the letter A-, which he traced on the colored ground he had applied sometimes with the point of a pencil, sometimes with the stem of his brush or an even blunter instrument, in ranks of scarcely legible ciphers crowding closely together and above one another, always the same and yet never repeating themselves, rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream."

After thirty years the two characters meet again, once more by chance, and the backpacker, Jacques Austerlitz — who turns out to be an art historian — tells the story of his life. Rescued from the Nazis as a small child, raised in Wales, Austerlitz has spent his adulthood in flight from the horror of his origins. He refuses to ask where he comes from; World War II is a blank to him; he can't even write letters to Germany. Not surprisingly, he has never been able to finish his dissertation — much less make friends or keep a lover. He is a miracle of repression, but now his repression has begun to break down and Austerlitz has gone in search of the truth about himself.

The kinds of coincidence that in Sebald's previous books seemed merely true-to-life now bear the weight of plot. And compared to the distant, ambiguous acts of sympathy that fill his previous books, the bond between Sebald and Austerlitz feels disappointingly literary. They are "fated" (that most conventional of literary conventions) for one another.

A lover of Sebald's realist masterpieces can't read Austerlitz without feeling that it is an homage to the golden age of English realism: a dusting off of the old Victorian machinery to see how it does with a war-orphan at the end of the twentieth century. It does well, in Sebald's hands, but still it's an homage, and, as such, it's the last thing we'd have expected from a writer whose genius has seemed, until now, all his own.

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