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40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The unbearable lightness of memory, 20 Dec 2001
By A Customer
I was half way through this wonderful book when I read of Sebald's death in a road accident last weekend. Fortunately for us, it stands as a brilliant culmination of his four 'novels', but also shows us what we have lost.
Austerlitz has been driven to the brink of mental illness by the suppression of early childhood memories and the refusal to hear of anything that has occurred in Europe since the nineteenth century. Following his upbringing in North Wales, his life in London and his travels in Prague we see reality creeping in. Austerlitz slowly discovers himself and in doing so discovers the twentieth century for us.
Part of the pleasure of reading Sebald is the prose - measured, precise and beautifully translated - and the inclusion of photographs that contribute as much to the atmosphere as the text. There is also much of Thomas Bernhard here - the lack of paragraph breaks, the long sentences, the story told by a first person relating a long conversation with a second or third, a main character who has spent his life researching some obscure topic but will never manage to put pen to paper (Bernhard's Concrete and The Lime Works), and a preoccupation with compromised morals. There is perhaps even a nod to Bernhard with the description of the Nazi rally in Vienna's Heldenplatz - the subject of a play by Bernhard.
I was entranced by The Rings Of Saturn but Austerlitz is even better - easily the best book I read this year. That we will not have any more books like this I find unbearable at the moment.
If Austerlitz appeals to you, then do try Bernhard too - The Loser or Cutting Timber would be a good place to start.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dense, meaningful, possibly significant, 11 Nov 2001
Sebald tells a fictional story of the adult Austerlitz's search for his past, from his birth in Prague, through his early childhood, leading to his passage to Britain just before WW2 on one of the last trains sending young children to safety.Sebald adopts a deliberately meandering style, the narrative interspersed with thoughts about science, architecture, 20th century history. The book is introspective and dense, drawing the reader into a melancholic frame of mind, around thoughts of holocaust, persecution and brutality. Among his many descriptions of European architecture he writes about the Palace of Justice in Brussels, ". . . a kind of wonder, which is in itself a dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins"... In reading a book like this, it is necessary to ask the question what is it about? In my view, Sebald seeks to show his readers that the consciousness of the awful horrors of the last century, effectively put a stop to any lightness or levity in the present. Our bleakest expectations of human behaviour colour our experience today so that all is shot through with memories of the dreadful things that happened a mere 60 years ago (and continue to recur to this day). Not a happy read, but probably an "important" book and having read Austerlitz a week or so ago I find my thoughts returning to it, and wanting to revisit it. Incidentally, the book is beautifully produced, being illustrated with a collection of black and white photographs, some of which I assume Sebald shot himself, and others which I imagine are "found" objects from his collection. The photos are incredibly melancholic, presenting an impression of extreme lonliness and human isolation. The book itself is beautifully presented, printed on rich paper with an elegant typescript and a high quality binding. I suspect it will be a collectors item in years to come.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
engrossing and sagacious, 3 Jan 2003
Jacques Austerlitz, in the early 1990s, is a man in his late fifties; he has grown up in Wales - although we hear little of his life there - and now, is searching for the family that he was separated from as a child of five.
Austerlitz is a wonderful book about the War, Europe, architecture and family, through which we are given insight to a fascinating life and mind.
The narrative style is highly original and effective, the narrator remaining largely anonymous - we learn little of him - but, through his chance meetings over the years, are told about the life of a gentleman named Austerlitz, an architectural historian.
Sebald tells it Russian Doll-style, in the voice of his narrator, as a retelling of what Austerlitz had told him, and occasionally, of what further characters, in turn, have told Austerlitz - a wonderful play on the theme of representation, enjoyably demanding to read, and engaging too.
Sebald’s prose is delectable and inimitable, and syntactically he eschews, here as in other works, the use of chaptering, paragraphing and parenthesising; inverted commas or paragraph breaks for dialogue; and prefers not to use punctuation such as colons or semi-colons, using instead, numerous commas and intricately long sentencing. This all adds up to an enveloping and engrossing prose style that captivates you as each successive moment of this curious meandering unfurls.
In a sense, the use of photography and illustration act as successful and sensitive punctuations within this solid and confident body of text, and refreshingly, are not dwelt on - serving simply to delight the artistic palate and compliment the lyrical work - like a glass of Champagne served with soft cheese and crackers; I quickly found myself lost in the enigmatic detailing of these worlds within the world of this novel, and they leave you pondering - What came first? - the image or the text.
Sebald's Germanic, precise and probing style of writing does lack passion in the romantic sense, but he compensates this immeasurably with his striking poeticism and labyrinthine intellectualism; he is a writer quite unlike any other and, I did, for some time, want to read no other books than his.
His content is informal and evocative, somewhat like having a quiet conversation with a professor over a cup of coffee and some cake as they display a close and intricate erudition.
In conclusion, I can highly recommend this novel; his untimely death was simply tragic, but he has left us with a valuable, worthy and multifarious œuvre, and reading Sebald called to my mind the work of Milan Kundera, whom I have enjoyed equally and, any of whose work, in this context, I can recommend in addition.
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