Austerlitz - BookWyrm

298 pages

English language

Published Nov. 8, 2001 by Random House.

ISBN:: 978-0-375-50483-9
OCLC Number:: 46713092

(4 reviews)

Over thirty years, in the course of conversations that take place across Europe, a man named Jacques Austerlitz tells a nameless companion of his ongoing struggle with the riddle of his identity. A small child when he immigrates alone to England in the summer of 1939, Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh couple who raise him, and he strains to orient himself in a world whose natural reference points have been obliterated. When he is a much older man, fleeting childhood memories return to him, and he obeys an instinct he only dimly understands and follows their trail back to the vanished world he left behind a half century before, the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe.

With this work of devastating beauty and pathos, W. G. Sebald has found a way to give form and substance to the previously unimaginable. Austerlitz is the …

Over thirty years, in the course of conversations that take place across Europe, a man named Jacques Austerlitz tells a nameless companion of his ongoing struggle with the riddle of his identity. A small child when he immigrates alone to England in the summer of 1939, Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh couple who raise him, and he strains to orient himself in a world whose natural reference points have been obliterated. When he is a much older man, fleeting childhood memories return to him, and he obeys an instinct he only dimly understands and follows their trail back to the vanished world he left behind a half century before, the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe.

With this work of devastating beauty and pathos, W. G. Sebald has found a way to give form and substance to the previously unimaginable. Austerlitz is the most magnificent expression to date of an uncanny literary vision whose newness seems less like an invention than like the miraculous return of a forgotten sense.

13 editions

markm reviewed Austerlitz by Winfried Georg Sebald

Review of 'Austerlitz' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I hadn't read Sebald before. I came to this novel after reading a review of a recent biography. I see that this book was very moving for a lot of the reviewers, and although the part of the book about the Holocaust is certainly moving, I didn't feel that what the author was trying to do clicked for me. It is a sort of pseudo-history in which someone's appropriated story is fictionalized but also illustrated with a set of found fey photographs. It seemed sometimes that the author must have written the text specifically for the photographs. I'm new to this author and he certainly has a massive reputation, so I might come around to more stars if I cogitate over it - but not today.