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Austerlitz
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Austerlitz
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Austerlitz
Audiobook7 hours

Austerlitz

Written by W.G. Sebald

Narrated by Richard Matthews

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Aus-terlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 7, 2017
ISBN9780525500889
Unavailable
Austerlitz
Author

W.G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) nació en Wertach, Alemania. Después de acabar sus estudios universitarios vivió en Suiza, y luego se trasladó a Inglaterra. Desde 1970 fue profesor en Norwich. Entre sus galardones figuran el premio Joseph Breitbach, el Heinrich Heine y, en 2002, el Independent Foreign Fiction por Austerlitz. En Anagrama se han publicado Del natural, Vértigo, Pútrida patria, Los emigrados, Los anillos de Saturno, Sobre la historia natural de la destrucción, Austerlitz y Campo Santo.

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Reviews for Austerlitz

Rating: 4.1501382436260625 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel like I should have liked this book more than I did. Austerlitz is ultimately about identity, and the story is compelling—the main character was one of the children sent away on Kindertransport before WWII—but I never really felt like I connected with this book. The writing is very good, and I actually liked all of the architectural discussion, but I wasn’t crazy about the style. Maybe I’m doing it wrong? Oh well.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Synopsis: Austerlitz is sitting a school exam when his teacher informs him of his formal identity which must be used for exam purposes. It is then he learns that he was transported as a child in order to evade the war. As an adult, Austerlitz became fixated with architecture and the narrator (who remains unnamed throughout) decides to retrace his past.My Opinion: The first 100 pages are a little bit confusing, but once you learn who is who and what is happening, the story becomes easier to read. I was about ready to give up on this book as I couldn't get into it despite its positive reviews online. The unraveling of the past doesn't really begin until about 200 pages in; the first 200 pages are focused on Austerlitz in the present day and his interest in architecture.There is a lot of symbolism throughout with the architecture and animals, however I found myself skim reading a significant portion of the book. Additionally, there are no chapters which makes the passing of time slightly confusing and disjointed as a reader.A very eery read. From reading other reviews I can infer that other people took more out of this than what I did. I think had the discovering-of-the-past unfolded earlier on, the descriptive language would have intrigued me slightly more than it did.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the second time I’ve read this novel; the first time was soon after its publication in rh U.S. The book haunted me for reasons I couldn’t articulate. So, I thought it would be a good choice for my book club under the theme of “Memory." It proved to be the most controversial book in my three years of moderating this group.The unnamed narrator is a man without a country, wandering through Europe studying architecture. In a railway station, he makes an acquaintance with a man who introduces himself as Austerlitz. Sebald does away with plot, characterization, dialogue, and events leading to other events. What we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice. Austerlitz is on a quest to find out who he is. What he recounts to the narrator is a reconstructive odyssey in search of himself. The two men encounter each other, seemingly by coincidence, again and again in their respective travels, always discussing architecture and history, but sharing nothing of their personal lives until 1996 when their conversation finally turns to Austerlitz’s life history. The incredible power of this book is how Sebald tells the story and layers the subtext to a point that it requires re-reading with intense attention to every detail. Sebald combats the erasure of history on the collective level as well as the individual. What the Nazis take from Austerlitz is not his life or property but his essential personhood. The traumatic effects of separation are not felt by Austerlitz until the distractions of study and career are cleared away, exposing the emptiness of his disconnected, dislocated existence.The photographs, unannotated throughout, are part of what makes this novel so powerful and haunting, perhaps because photographs are so evocative and unaffected by the passage of time—except for the fading. The photos give us the impression of a memoir, but some of them have no connection to the prose, yet we, as the reader, are always looking for the pattern. The Nocturama and its accompanying photos of the monkey, the owl, Wittgenstein, and another man set the tone for the conceit of fake realities, which include the false reality of Austerlitz’s own childhood, the horrific distortion of reality by the Nazis, and the false universe of the Holocaust. Sebald says, “This recourse to peripherality (the photographs) arises partly as a narrative strategy to cope with the inherent unrepresentability of that which occurred in the Nazi concentration camps.”Central to understanding this novel is the reader's understanding that Sebald is German but not Jewish. He is the narrator; he is not Austerlitz. He writes as he does to cope with the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded him growing up in Germany. His father worked in the Nazi machine. Sebald’s conviction: “This is not so much a way of understanding the Holocaust, so much as it is a way of making us think about how we can’t understand the Holocaust.” This book is a combination of memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Austerlitz is an odd, old-fashioned book. Its narrator encounters the title character. He then repeats the story Austerlitz tells, and in Austerlitz's own story, sometimes he tells the stories of others. So the entire narration is at least once and often twice-removed. I don't think there is any actual dialogue anywhere in the book. Just first person narrative. The paragraphs go on forever, and there is one famous sentence that takes up over 7 pages (apparently 9 in the original German). But despite these obstacles, the book is highly readable. Even when it ranges over time and distance again and again without a break, the narrative keeps its hold on you and makes you keep reading. You really don't want to put this book down. The black and white photographs interspersed throughout the text are an essential part of the experience, also. Sometimes they are clearly referred to in the text, sometimes not.The story itself concern's Austerlitz's exploration of his own past, trying to track down what became of the parents who put him on a train from Czechoslovakia in 1939 when he is 4 years old to escape the coming Nazi invasion. He ends up in Wales, with a minister and his wife, who give him little love and no information about his true identity, which he only discovers as a teenager--or at least he discovers his real name. Only later does he face up to the task of discovering the truth behind his life. This comes well into the book, however. In the earlier sections Austerlitz speaks to the narrator about architecture, but as we will see, everything is related. Some reviews compare this book to the work of Borges, whom Sebald admired, and in the way it mixes fact and history into a work of fiction, that is true enough, but this novel doesn't contain the sense of the fantastic that much of Borges' work does. Even the dreams and visions that plague Austerlitz, narrated in great detail, are still firmly grounded in reality.It is wonderful to see old memories awakening in Austerlitz as he visits Prague and other places, and as he learns more, he begins to understand some of his own past behavior and period of depression. As an academic, he struggles through a long work in German to better understand the Theresienstadt ghetto/concentration where his mother was sent. But while the Holocaust is at the center of the book, it isn't the main focus in my opinion. Rather, it is a book about how the past affects us in ways we may not even understand. In that sense, the book is more Faulknerian than Borgesian. ("The past is never dead. ... Actually, it's not even past.") Austerlitz, like the rest of us, will never find all the answers he seeks. But Sebald has brought this fragile, complicated character to life and given us a glimpse of real and psychological horrors that cannot--and must not--be forgotten.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Structurally this novel is quite interesting. The two main characters meet by chance in a railway station and strike up a conversation about architectural history. The narrator of the novel is a nameless scholar entranced by the man he meets, Jacques Austerlitz, whose narration of his life is the substance of the book. Hence the entire book is a story within a story. Another unusual structural device is the inclusion of photographs, maps, and the like; both creating a sense that the novel is nonfiction and also reflecting the interest Austerlitz has in photography. This method of "fixing" the story in reality and history contradicts the surreal and detached atmosphere of the narration. Finally the physical structure of the language used to tell the story is unhampered by paragraphs and sentence length. Instead the story flows uninterrupted. The plot is the story of Austerlitz's life as his repressed memories slowly unfold. In a sense, the reader discovers the story of his life at the same time as the man himself does. A child brought to England on a Kindertransport from mainland Europe in 1939, Austerlitz is raised by a strict Welsh minister and his wife, who do not encourage the boy to remember his former life. Eventually, the boy remembers nothing of who he is. It is only as a middle-aged adult that fleeting memories begin to return, and Austerlitz wanders down the path to his own identity. In simple terms, the novel is a reflection on the Holocaust and its effects on the people who survived it. Because of its unusual structure and surreal atmosphere, however, the book is not one to appeal to every reader, even those interested in the Holocaust. One has to detach from expectations and history itself in order to flow with the narration. I found it to be an unusual reading experience.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The writing in this book was so perfect I had to read it very closely. It was such a worthwhile read and always kept my interest. However, and I blame myself, I was expecting some twist or something more, so the ending took me by surprise. This is an author I want to read more of.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Some books come right to the point and you are one with the characters from the beginning. Not this one. Sebald does all he can to put obstacles between the reader and the nominal protagonist, both by style and character.A nameless narrator stands between the reader and Jacques Austerlitz, recounting how they meet by accident and then seem to keep meeting until a sort of friendship is formed. At first, Austerlitz talks only of architecture; eventually, he reveals a story of lost identity and emotional starvation as part of the World War II Kindertransport, and how he manages through sudden memories and hints of memory to find his way to his real history.Sebald's style is not easy. There are no chapters, and no paragraphs, and the prose, translated from the German, contains some extraordinarily lengthy sentences that stretch for pages. In addition, the convention of Austerlitz telling our narrator a story (which of course he is telling to us), and of others telling Austerlitz stories which he in turn tells the narrator, creates a feeling of mirrors within mirrors and requires close attention.Sebald leavens this prose with many photographic images of what is mentioned in the text, all of them documentary style black-and-white. They add to the bleakness of the story.And yet - I can't help feeling that this novel will only get richer on subsequent readings. The language is meticulous and often the descriptions are vivid, far more than the photographs. The emotions inherent in the story can be found in some of the most restrained prose. As soon as I finished it, I started it again, to see how I would react to the style once more, and I was hard pressed to put it down.One of the members of our reading group called it a fever dream, and it has some of that dreamlike quality, disjunct and often involving memories, dreams, and the stories of others, someof whom are long gone. It's not for everyone, surely. I would not call it 'entertaining' - but striking, and significant.Note also that Sebald is a German of the generation after the war, and that he wrote this in German, speaking to his fellows at least, using an oblique angle to illuminate the damage caused by a now-familiar horror.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Sebald's work is haunting. There are images and passages that will stay with you forever after reading them. It is very difficult to summarize Sebald's books as they cover so many different things in a meandering, seemingly ramdom manner. With Sebald, however, nothing is ever random. This is perhaps more apparent in The Rings of Saturn, which starts and ends, in a way, with Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. The Amazon.com summary will tell you that this is a story of a man named Austerlitz who was put on a train in 1939 in Prague to escape Jewish persecution and was adopted by a Welsh family, who told him nothing of his true identity. The book is Austerlitz's discovery of himself, his past, and his parents told through the lens of an unnamed narrator. All of that is true. But this book is so much more than that. Instead of summarizing Austerlitz, I'll give some of the topics, which are generally common themes in his work. The first is memory; how it changes, what it is, what it means, and tied directly to it: loss. In a more general sense, Sebald is concerned with the past and its role in our present. One of the most beautiful sections of this book deals with a train station and a WWII Jewish ghetto in Antwerp. Another common theme of Sebald's is walking and experiencing the land. In Austerlitz, Sebald describes (though this is really an inadequate term for what he does) an area of Wales, along the British coastline. One main feature of this area is a house which becomes, in essence, a natural history museum. Another section, near the end, deals with the Bibliotheque National of France, which has just undergone an enormous transformation and relocation. His description of the housing and accessing of the past is both lyrical, and for lack of a better word, heartbreaking. Thinking about it now, I am reminded of the architectural scenes in Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. There is an air of great melancholy and great loneliness in Sebald's prose; yet it is achingly beautiful. All of Sebald's books incorporate photographs; some relate to the material being discussed in the given passage, others do not. The most haunting of these, in Auzterlitz, is a still of a film which shows a blurry image of a woman's face half in shadow. Austerlitz believes this may be his mother. This book will stay with you, it will haunt you. It will touch your jaded, modern, cynical, heart. It may make you want to weep. He is one of the most powerful writers of this century. Let Sebald take you on a journey; I promise you, you will not regret it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Just didn't take to it. Thought it meandering and ponderous. (Which were the exact reasons I loved Rings of Saturn.) Maybe it was over-hyped.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    a stunning masterpiece from Sebald.Fot those who havent read him, the book is sort of Bernhard,Kafka,Borges,Proust,and Lenz combined all together, but he is even a lot more than that.Austerliz is slowly discovering the history of his life, in a misshapen world - of reality and memory.to discover more from this highly emotional and complex book, will ruin the experience.but it's a must read book, that also demands a re-read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a thoroughly brilliant book. It's power does not lie in plotting--most of the book takes the form of conversation or monologue, and its events (like the events in a tragedy by Sophocles) are transparent and foreseeable--but in its incisive, beautiful, and shattering series of revelations.

    I would give this ten stars if I could.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Why the hell did I decide to read Holocaust fiction on Christmas Eve? Granted, this was a breathtaking book, but still.

    Page long sentences, reflections on memory, the past, architecture, ruins, history, atrocity, etc., etc. It's really good. Don't take my word for it with this review and just read it. Although preferably in a time when you can afford to be melancholy and brooding.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's been a few years since I read this, but I can still comfortably say this is my favorite fiction book. Every time I picked this up I was transported into the world created by W.G. Sebald. It felt almost like I was the character in the book. Very few fiction books grab me like this one did, where while I'm reading it the only thing I want to be doing is reading this book. When I wasn't reading it I was thinking about it. When I was sleeping I was dreaming about it. Reading this book, in fact, is like being the main character in Sebald's dream, and the dream is Austerlitz. I don't know how else to express it. Another favorite author of mine is Alan Furst. His books are more like watching a great spy movie, full of drama, where you have a personal investment in what happens to the character. So reading Furst is like watching a densely detailed movie. And reading Austerlitz is like you're in the movie yourself, totally immersed. You don't read this book so much as you experience it, or enter into it's world.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Austerlitz is not an easy read. A book that spans over 400 pages, with no chapter breaks or paragraphs. It's one long stream of consciousness, except that it's not. But it is a book that benefits from long, uninterrupted reads. Reads that I do not get. So that's my only quibble with the book; a quibble that's more due to my life than the book itself.

    Austerlitz follows the encounter of our unnamed narrator with Jacques Austerlitz, one of the children on the kindertransport out of war-torn Europe to the relative safety of the UK. As soon as the four year-old Austerlitz gets to his British family, in Wales, they strip him of his identity and give him a new name. Growing up in the cold (both physically and emotionally) house in Bala with two distant adults for company, Austerlitz stagnates. Only the escape to a boarding school brings him some satisfaction, to the point where the loathes going home at holidays. It's during his time at the boarding school that he first finds out that his actual name is very different from the one he has been using for much of his life.

    Our narrator encounters Austerlitz infrequently, but each time the story picks up without introductions or unnecessary small talk. Slowly, through the meandering tale that he tells, we find out about his past. Or rather, what Austerlitz found out about his past. The tangents and extra information are wonderful snippets of a great mind, but I can see how these would be irritating to some readers.

    We find out parts of his past gradually, but there's no happy ending there. I preferred it that way; a happy ending in such a book would seem forced and fake. Instead, some of the threads are left open with hints as to what happened.

    This is a brilliant book, but it isn't for everyone. The lack of structure, or the seeming lack of structure, will put some people off. I really wished that I could have gone away for a few days, sat down and read the book without the interruptions that my life contains. It would have been a far more satisfying way of reading the book.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I couldn't do it. I really wanted to finish this book. I finish every book I start, and even if I hate them, I enjoy writing scathing reviews. But as my wife pointed out, life is too short. It's not just the execrable prose style, which I'm sure is intentional and has some theoretical justification. It's not the photos- I quite like the idea of photos in novels. It's not just the idiotic attempts to be highbrow, by referencing Wittgenstein (whom the narrator thinks is a 'dark thinker'!) And it's not just the hype, which is nauseating (*this* is meant to stand up next to Kafka and Proust?) All of these things together, it's true, would give me pause. But what is truly insulting is the sub-liberal-guilt posture the narrator and Austerlitz assume: in this novel's world, all 'great' undertakings are merely hubristic and doomed to failure; all ambition for improving the world is bound to end up with the panopticon; and everything, everything, everything is in some sort of relationship to the holocaust.
    I figure this 'great idea' is the source of the book's popularity (my copy proudly proclaims 'NATIONAL BESTSELLER'). If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that the holocaust sucked balls. In the middle ages, almost everyone could agree that 'God is great.' The literature expressing this claim was profoundly, profoundly dull. Similarly, literature which tells us that the holocaust sucked balls is profoundly, profoundly dull. This is not deep thinking, this is platitude wrapped in an extraordinarily un-inventive form.
    All that said, maybe the second half is really great, mind-blowing even. I'll never know.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a brilliant book, but not for me at least an easy one. Several of the reviews below capture more of its extraordinary qualities than I can do: skip ahead. If you choose not to, the story is not complex, and emerges slowly - a remote intellectual learns late in life that he was sent to the UK as a five-year old in 1939, and undertakes a search for his own past which leads him to the horrors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The story may be simple, but the style is not. Sebald does not use paragraphs or chapters, his sentances can meander on at great lenght, and his narrative device -- monologues nested within monologues -- can be confusing. This took me quite a while to get used to (I fear that I am a Middlemarch girl at heart) though in time the style begins to resound with the substance of the novel, layering thought upon throught, memory upon memory. The layering (or perhaps more properly infusion) is illuminated with a wonderful use of language. The way in which the words and phrases and larger units are chosen and drift into one another is very beautiful in English: I wonder what it is like in German. Nor is the content of this extraordinary book simple, in any sense. It is about memory -- anyone's memory -- and how it interacts with "real life". It is about the dead and living, and the relationship between them. And it is about the European past, and European guilt, and civilization, and language -- at one point, Austerlitz compares a language to an old city, full of byways and monuments and hidden passages. Throughout the book, it seems to me, buildings and cities are metaphores for the past as well as embodiments of it. As many other readers note, this book at times feels more like a meditation (or a series of hallucinations) than a conventional novel, but it is painfully powerful in doing what conventional novels try to do -- make us feel the emotions of others. The description of the narrowing life of a Jew in Prague after the Nazi invasion was one of the most painful evocations I have ever read, though the horror we see directly is psychological, not physical. And in a way, perhaps there is more truth in a layered, shifting, permeable reality than in what we "objectively" experience every day. A very powerful experience. I have added "The Emigrants" to my reading list.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Many reviewers have cited the difficulty of the prose in "Austeritz," but I find this difficult to comprehend. Have they never read Proust? Joyce? Faulkner? Once one has survived these trials by fire, Sebald's prose is comparatively accessible. Still others have claimed that this is a "Holocaust novel," and I find this equally perplexing. Certainly, while Austerlitz's childhood experience of being sent to England via Kindertransport away from his parents forms a locus for what little narrative drive there is, the themes of memory, contemporary European identity, and its peculiarly unique aesthetic vision are much more important as Austerlitz recounts his story.It may be the case that the perennial complaint of difficulty rests in the fact that its themes are so deeply intertwined with its pensive inwardness, its brooding style. The short, pithy declarative quality of Hemingway or J. M. Coetzee could not effectively evoke the complex anamnestic matrix that Sebald is so concerned with constructing. It is no coincidence that Austerlitz is never seen without his trusty rucksack. It points directly to Austerlitz's emotional, intellectual, and geographical exile, that he is at home both everywhere and nowhere.These imbricated variations on exile, more than anything else, inform Austerlitz. His near-autistic attention to the details of architecture are, at their heart, the inept attempts of a man who has been cut off from history to radically place himself within it, to entangle himself in some sort of web of meaning in and through which we find ourselves so often complacent. This novel is so resonant because Austerlitz's experience is not the singular, independent story that it seems to be. He is an Everyman who goads us into a probing search of our own lost histories, the "architecture" of lived everydayness of life that goes unnoticed. At the same time, Sebald knows that our experience with history is a dynamic one in that it shapes us as much as we shape it. In the end, Austerlitz's search for personal belonging and (to use Heidegger's word) "Sorge," incites us all to set out in our own revelatory search.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A great work by the late German writer Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, killed in a tragic car accident in December 2001, in England, where he had been living, writing and teaching since 1966. In this long book, with only three paragraphs and a number of beautiful photographs, the narrator tells of his conversations with Jacques Austerlitz over the years, and of Austerlitz struggle to uncover his roots. Written in a contemplative mood, and progressing throught a series of disquisitions about art, architecture, military constructions, town planning, botany... the book let us picture the slowly growing inner doubts of the retired architectural historian Austerlitz about his own origins and the discovery of his past. This turns out to result in a long journey into traumatic events in recent european history, of which Austerlitz was part as a boy of five, transported from Prague to England in one of the kindertransport in the last days of peace in 1939, already after the invasion of Checoslovakia by the nazis, as he now rediscovers in his enquires in Belgium, London, Prague, Marienbad, Terezinbad, and Paris. Not a light reading, but certainly a compulsive one!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Prose without paragraphs yet close to dreaming and profoundly moving. An unforgetable experience, unique in its feeling and tone. Extremely recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life." p.212A book about a man, Austerlitz, who is pictured on the cover as a boy looking very much like The Little Prince, trying to find his way back to his planet. Yes, it is about the holocaust, but it is not a futile exercise in despair. The writing is too good to allow that easy of a route. Instead, the hypnotic prose sustains us in a state of meditation. I've never read any other author who can do that. It slows your breath down. The language is easy, but serpentine, and to follow the thought is a lot of work, even though it is easy work, I find myself being carried away by it. It reminded me a lot of his other book, Emigrants, which is also excellent, but focuses on the story of just one man instead of several. I really don't know what else to say about this, it's always hard to write about Sebald. This is great stuff."It was obviously of little use that I had discovered the sources of my distress and, looking back over all the past years, could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings: reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement." p. 228
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Really just 2½ stars for me. I rounded up because Sebald gave me plenty to think about. However, I found the style of very long sentences and paragraphs that went on for 5 or 10 pages tiring. I also missed the use of quotation marks to distinguish what was narrative being told by Austerlitz to the unnamed narrator & what was being told to Austerlitz & what was the unnamed narrator's thoughts. Surprisingly, the change in voice in the middle of sentences worked well, once I got used to it. For example (my underlining):"In the first few weeks after his return from Bohemia, Austerlitz continued his tale as we walked on, he had learnt by heart the names and dates of birth and death of those buried here, he had taken home pebbles and ivy leaves and on one occasion a stone rose, and the stone hand broken off one of the angels, but however much my walks in Tower Hamlets might soothe me during the day, said Austerlitz, at night I was plagued by the most frightful anxiety attacks which sometimes lasted for hours on end."The sentence starts out from the unnamed narrator's perspective and switches midstream to Austerlitz's perspective, yet it is perfectly clear.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Haunting. Especially the qualities of everyday life covering deep hurts and desires.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Bewildering and kind of hypnotic. It took me until halfway through the book to get engaged with it, and then I really was hooked although I felt like I was comprehending only half of what I was reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Austerlitz" is a wonderful exploration of memory and also identity. Austerlitz, the character, relays his story to the narrator, pictures are frequent in the novel and the whole form of the book acts as a sort of historical document. Sebald chooses to ruminate many times on the nature of memory and the assaults of the past that frequently assail Austerlitz are examples of the lack of control and consistency an individual has in the present. The prose is lucid, although it meanders at times, and grand in the descriptions of trauma and Austerlitz's accounts of his episode to the narrator. The one issue I did have was with the character of Austerlitz. There's a degree of emotional despondency that doesn't really get resolved in a way that one can fully relate to the character more quizzically observe as a sort of emotional oddity or living ghost.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Oppervlakkig beschouwd is dit boek een eindeloze opeenvolging van afstandelijke observaties, een lange ketting van puur visuele beschrijvingen, door de auteur zelf (tenminste als we ervan uit gaan dat de verteller Sebald is) en vooral door zijn wat mysterieuze vriend Jacques Austerlitz. Dat lijkt niet erg aanlokkelijk, en het wordt ook niet bevorderd door de monotone en trage vertelstijl die heel het boek door volgehouden wordt. Ik kan begrijpen dat veel mensen het boek na enkele tientallen pagina?s dichtsmijten. Maar tegelijk is die vertelstijl net wat het boven alle andere literatuur doet uitsteken. Je kan het erg vergelijken met de stijl van Marcel Proust: lange meanderende zinnen waarin vooral de uiterlijke kant van de dingen beschreven wordt, ook erg visueel dus en met een opeenstapeling van details. Net als in zijn vorige romans heeft Sebald weer tientallen, eerder onbestemde, zwartwit-foto?s opgenomen die het realistisch karakter van de vertelling moeten onderstrepen (maar daardoor juist onzeker maken). Ook het voortdurende gebruik van de indirecte rede (op bijna elke pagina staat er?zei Austerlitz?en in het tweede derde van het boek wordt daar zelfs een dubbele indirecte rede van maakt, ?zei Vera, zei Austerlitz? als hij de woorden van het vroegere kindermeisje van Austerlitz weergeeft), versterkt het bezwerende, hypnotiserende effect, alsof je (in het gezelschap van Austerlitz) permanent half wakend door een droomlandschap loopt. Ik vermoed dat Sebald daarmee ook bewust het effect van een zekere tijdeloosheid beoogde.En daarmee zijn we bij de metafictionele onderlaag van dit boek: het gaat in essentie over de tijd en over hoe wij als individu in of buiten die tijd staan, ermee worstelen, er geen greep op krijgen en er ook niet van los kunnen komen. Dat is in een notendop de tragiek van het levensverhaal van Austerlitz: deze ge?soleerde, hyperintroverte man, deze beschouwer van de buitenkant van de dingen (in het begin van het boek vertelt hij tot in den treure over de architecteur en bouwgeschiedenis van wat hij om zich heen ziet), leeft aanvankelijk eigenlijk buiten de tijd; maar in zijn langgerekte vertelling geeft hij weer hoe hij tot zijn ontzetting heeft moeten vaststellen dat hij onlosmakelijk verbonden is met een wel heel heftige episode van de menselijke geschiedenis, namelijk met de Holocaust. Die ontdekkingstocht wordt weergegeven als een heel langzaam afschrapen van zijn geheugen, van zijn herinneringen, als een archeoloog, tot hij op het punt komt dat hij uitkomt bij datgene wat hij blijkbaar heel zijn leven heeft verdrongen, en ontkend heeft. Ronduit meesterlijk is het, de manier waarop Sebald dit verhaal brengt. De door de schrijfstijl gesuggereerde tijdeloosheid, culmineert in een lange zin van 9 bladzijden waarin de onmenselijke machine van het concentratiekamp/getto van Theresienstadt tot leven wordt gebracht, ogenschijnlijk ingehouden-afstandelijk maar daardoor net hallucinant-gruwelijk.Austerlitz is voor mij ??n van de meesterwerken van de recente literatuur. Het is echt tragisch dat W.G. Sebald enkele maanden na het afwerken van dit boek in een verkeersongeval om het leven kwam. PS. Bonus voor de Vlaamse/Belgische lezer is dat het boek begint en eindigt in Antwerpen en Breendonk, waarmee ook het vernuftige spiegelspel dat in deze roman steekt onderstreept wordt.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Oppervlakkig beschouwd is dit boek een eindeloze opeenvolging van afstandelijke observaties, een lange ketting van puur visuele beschrijvingen, door de auteur zelf (tenminste als we ervan uit gaan dat de verteller Sebald is) en vooral door zijn wat mysterieuze vriend Jacques Austerlitz. Dat lijkt niet erg aanlokkelijk, en het wordt ook niet bevorderd door de monotone en trage vertelstijl die heel het boek door volgehouden wordt. Ik kan begrijpen dat veel mensen het boek na enkele tientallen pagina’s dichtsmijten. Maar tegelijk is die vertelstijl net wat het boven alle andere literatuur doet uitsteken. Je kan het erg vergelijken met de stijl van Marcel Proust: lange meanderende zinnen waarin vooral de uiterlijke kant van de dingen beschreven wordt, ook erg visueel dus en met een opeenstapeling van details. Net als in zijn vorige romans heeft Sebald weer tientallen, eerder onbestemde, zwartwit-foto’s opgenomen die het realistisch karakter van de vertelling moeten onderstrepen (maar daardoor juist onzeker maken). Ook het voortdurende gebruik van de indirecte rede (op bijna elke pagina staat er“zei Austerlitz”en in het tweede derde van het boek wordt daar zelfs een dubbele indirecte rede van maakt, “zei Vera, zei Austerlitz” als hij de woorden van het vroegere kindermeisje van Austerlitz weergeeft), versterkt het bezwerende, hypnotiserende effect, alsof je (in het gezelschap van Austerlitz) permanent half wakend door een droomlandschap loopt. Ik vermoed dat Sebald daarmee ook bewust het effect van een zekere tijdeloosheid beoogde.En daarmee zijn we bij de metafictionele onderlaag van dit boek: het gaat in essentie over de tijd en over hoe wij als individu in of buiten die tijd staan, ermee worstelen, er geen greep op krijgen en er ook niet van los kunnen komen. Dat is in een notendop de tragiek van het levensverhaal van Austerlitz: deze geïsoleerde, hyperintroverte man, deze beschouwer van de buitenkant van de dingen (in het begin van het boek vertelt hij tot in den treure over de architecteur en bouwgeschiedenis van wat hij om zich heen ziet), leeft aanvankelijk eigenlijk buiten de tijd; maar in zijn langgerekte vertelling geeft hij weer hoe hij tot zijn ontzetting heeft moeten vaststellen dat hij onlosmakelijk verbonden is met een wel heel heftige episode van de menselijke geschiedenis, namelijk met de Holocaust. Die ontdekkingstocht wordt weergegeven als een heel langzaam afschrapen van zijn geheugen, van zijn herinneringen, als een archeoloog, tot hij op het punt komt dat hij uitkomt bij datgene wat hij blijkbaar heel zijn leven heeft verdrongen, en ontkend heeft. Ronduit meesterlijk is het, de manier waarop Sebald dit verhaal brengt. De door de schrijfstijl gesuggereerde tijdeloosheid, culmineert in een lange zin van 9 bladzijden waarin de onmenselijke machine van het concentratiekamp/getto van Theresienstadt tot leven wordt gebracht, ogenschijnlijk ingehouden-afstandelijk maar daardoor net hallucinant-gruwelijk.Austerlitz is voor mij één van de meesterwerken van de recente literatuur. Het is echt tragisch dat W.G. Sebald enkele maanden na het afwerken van dit boek in een verkeersongeval om het leven kwam. PS. Bonus voor de Vlaamse/Belgische lezer is dat het boek begint en eindigt in Antwerpen en Breendonk, waarmee ook het vernuftige spiegelspel dat in deze roman steekt onderstreept wordt.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an extraordinary novel. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, who as a young child was evacuated from Czechoslovakia to the UK ahead of the Nazi invasion of 1938 and subsequently adopted by a Welsh family. Sebald's gorgeous, complex and evokative writing delves into Austerlitz's struggles with memory and identity when as an adult he attmepts to reconstruct his fractured past. The complexity of Sebald's language and style makes Austerlitz a bit of effort to get into, but the reward is an incredibly beautiful and memorable read. It's my favorite novel, hands-down.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Austerlitz fascinated me, but I couldn't say I loved it. Reading this book gave me the feeling of being jet-lagged somewhere in a strange city at three o'clock in the morning, having strange revelations that would seem bizarre in the daylight. Not a feeling I dislike, by any means. Sebald's attempts to find a prose style to match his explorations of memory and loss are beautiful and haunting, but for me at least the effect was more soporific than exhilarating. Maybe ‘hypnotic’ is a better word. The sentences ramble carefully, the sense reaching you faintly through a multiple-framing effect whereby the story is told by Jacques Austerlitz, to our distant, Sebaldesque narrator, meaning the sentences have a characteristic double-tagging device for reported speech which gives them a steady, sleepy rhythm:Can't you tell me the reason, she asked, said Austerlitz…Sometimes, so Lemoine told me, said Austerlitz…One sentence near the end sprawls across eight or nine pages, the clauses fading in and out of each other dreamily, like an interesting train of thought that goes through your mind just before you drop off to sleep. The number of paragraph breaks in the whole book can be counted on one hand. All this is in the service of recreating the effects of memory, as Sebald sees it: its unreliability, its fluidity compared to the rigid unchangeability of actual past events.Especially past tragedy. Because what Austerlitz is remembering is something he has spent his life trying to repress: his early childhood as part of a Jewish family in Prague in the 1930s. Hence, his meditations on architecture or natural history in the early part of the book all seem to be skirting round something else, as yet unnamed; and when finally he begins to trace the fate of his parents, there are a series of complex and rewarding thematic call-backs which tie the novel together very beautifully: an illustration seen in a Welsh children's Bible, for instance, of Israelites camped out in the desert, is echoed later by a description of a Nazi encampment in central Europe. Austerlitz's own name seems to be working hard, with its associations of war; and indeed it's only a few central letters away from the most infamous Holocaust site of all – one that's never mentioned in this book but which can be intimated from comments about family members ‘sent east’.This is not a ‘Holocaust novel’ in the usual sense, though – its real subject is not exactly what happened in the middle of the last century, but rather how Europe can and should remember it (Europe as a whole – this is a novel that deliberately ranges over cities, and languages, from across the whole continent). The vital importance of remembering, and also the complete futility of trying. And the futility also of expressing what we feel about it, because for Sebald language is always at best a poor approximation of reality, ‘something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us’. I disagree with this assessment, and I think Sebald's novel is in itself a weighty counter-argument. But nevertheless it's a very moving thesis written with a great deal of artistry, and if I felt more admiration than affection for it, that's perhaps just because I read it in a state of cold wonder at what he was managing to describe – ‘a kind of wonder,’ as Sebald says elsewhere, ‘which is in itself a form of dawning horror.’

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This has been my first encounter with Sebald -- I have to admit that I hadn't heard of him until a friend recommended this book. It was an exciting new discovery for me, and I raced through it in a weekend, but this is definitely a rich and complex book that I'm looking forward to coming back to and exploring at leisure, though I think I will try to read at least one other Sebald before that.For those who share my ignorance, Sebald was a German writer and literary scholar who taught for more than thirty years at UEA in Norwich. Sadly, he was killed in a car accident in 2001. Austerlitz was his last novel. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, sent to Britain as a five-year-old refugee on the eve of World war II, and brought up by a Welsh Calvinist minister and his wife in Bala. Austerlitz is told nothing about his past by the minister. He goes to boarding school and then Oxford, and becomes an architectural historian. But he has difficulty coming to terms with the gap in his early life. Finally, after a breakdown, he sets out to trace his origins. Not surprisingly, he discovers that his parents were Jews, deported by the Nazis.The story is told through multiple levels of indirectness. The narrator (a German writer living in East Anglia) meets Austerlitz on various occasions, and Austerlitz tells his story in direct speech. But most of the time, what Austerlitz is telling the narrator is what he has been told by someone else. On occasion, it goes one or two levels further down. For instance, we learn about Austerlitz's mother's deportation from a Theresienstadt survivor, who tells Vera, who tells Austerlitz, who tells the narrator, who tells us.All these levels are in direct speech. The point of this is, presumably, that everything we hear about actual events comes from an eye-witness. Most of what we are told about Theresienstadt comes from a published book written by a survivor, or from a German propaganda film Austerlitz views in the Imperial War Museum. Sebald does not feel it to be appropriate for a modern writer to create these events out of his imagination. The role of the literary imagination is in showing the effect that the past has on the modern character, Austerlitz, and on his immediate listener, the narrator.Buildings play a very important symbolic role in the narrative. Antwerpen Centraal, the Palais de Justice in Brussels, Liverpool Street, the Gare d'Austerlitz (inevitably), the Prague city archive, Theresienstadt itself, and the Bibliothéque François Mitterand all pop up at crucial points. The book is framed by two visits the narrator makes, on his own, to Fort Breendonk, near Mechelen, which the Germans used as a prison during the occupation of Belgium.Actually, I shouldn't have said "pop up" -- Sebald does use photographs interposed in the text very effectively, but he doesn't actually resort to pop-up buildings. Perhaps, had he lived longer...?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jacques Austerlitz is trying to regain his past in order to find out who he really is. As one of the countless innocent victims of the atrocities associated with World War II, the five-year old Austerlitz was separated from his Czech-born Jewish parents, who put him on a kindertransport to Great Britain in order to save his life. Raised by Welsh foster parents, he lives a fairly ordinary early existence with no apparent memories of (or interest in) his heritage. Only after a mid-life nervous breakdown does Austerlitz seek to recover as much information about his parents and their divergent fates as possible. However, given that this quest begins decades after those fates were sealed, Austerlitz is left to piece together what information he can through visits to research archives, historical sites, and conversations with elderly survivors who were first-hand observers of the horrific events surrounding the Holocaust. Ultimately, Austerlitz is a book that explores how we remember the people, places, and things that give us our identities but are gradually receding into the past. The protagonist’s journey serves as a perfect metaphor for how, as time passes and eye witnesses to any particular occurrence pass on, those memories must be reconstructed from the libraries, museums, and written and media records where they reside. However, how accurate and complete are those “gatekeepers” of our shared histories ever able to be? That question becomes particularly poignant with regard to what occurred in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s since, more than 70 years later, so few people who lived those experiences are still around today to bear witness directly. As compelling as I found the theme of Austerlitz to be, I actually had a somewhat conflicted reaction to the novel itself. I admire the author’s sense of invention in how the tale is told; Sebald uses an almost stream-of-consciousness style that effectively combines the fictional and historical elements of the story. Further, some of the prose is absolutely stunning in its beauty. In contrast, though, there were some elements of the book’s structure that struck me as awkward: the use of the unnamed narrator created an unnecessary distraction in how many of the sentences had to be phrased, the paucity of paragraphs made it difficult to maintain focus, and the use of so many photographs became a bit of an indulgence as considerable effort was sometimes given to describing a picture that was otherwise irrelevant to the story. So, on balance, while I can certainly recommend this book for the important ideas it develops, that is an endorsement that must unfortunately come with some reservations.