This novel is obviously not everyone's cup of tea, but it's mine. I was lent it without having asked for it or even heard of it, and to have a hope of enjoying it I would suggest - don't read too many reviews before you start. Favourable as well as unfavourable, they could frighten you off.
The book begins with a digression, but there's no way of knowing that if one is starting from cold. It could be a travelogue, showing the fascination with detail and the reflective, analytical and detached cast of mind that pervades it right to the end. The main narrative eases itself in shortly after without any change of pace, style or tone, and the calm passionless idiom never varies up to the last page. Jacques Austerlitz was a refugee from the nazis, but too young to have clear recollections of the time. He was brought up by a childless and cheerless Welsh couple, given a new name and told nothing about his origins. These come to light, as they can in novels, when as a talented and above-average pupil he turns out a model of an essay on the subject of - the battle of Austerlitz, wouldn't you believe. He reminds me of nothing so much as the 'faint phantom' who visits Penelope in the Odyssey. Everything he says is reported by the 'shell' narrator, and his own narrations in their turn contain the reported utterances of others. A brief allusion is made to his slight resemblance to Wittgenstein, and it's hard not to think of the philosopher repeatedly in this tale of a lonely, compulsive, brooding thinker whose emotions and whose very identity have been buried and repressed. He makes his own Odyssey to discover what he can about it, and his 3-week bout of amnesia is, for me, one of the most telling and effective touches in the book. To me this is not another piece of Holocaust-literature, but it has its own highly individual slant on the era and on the pettiness as well as the brutality that made up that deviation of the human spirit and mind.
There is a lot more to the book than the ghostly Austerlitz. He and his narrator are interested in places and things for their own sake, not just in relation to him. I share this outlook in my own way, and as it happens the story took me to some of my own favourite spots - Prague, the strangely empty and unwelcoming Mawddach estuary, the southern Rhine valley, even the old Liverpool Street railway terminus with its gloomy double pillars. It informed me on subjects I knew nothing about, e.g. moths and urban fortifications. Austerlitz even attended the same Oxford college as I did, and I wonder who the real people were (or are) whose photographs we are shown purporting to be Austerlitz as a boy and as a young rugby-player.
The book does not read in the least like a translation. It is in what I might call 'perfect English' with the intentional implication that you would know it was not an English-speaker speaking. That is all part of the effect, as is the absence of chapter-division, paragraphs and quotation-marks. If that sounds daunting in any way, let me report quite truthfully that I was well into the book before I even noticed. For me, a nigh-on-compulsive read.
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