|
Loading... Austerlitz (original 2001; edition 2001)by W.G. Sebald
Work detailsAusterlitz by W. G. Sebald (2001)
The most challenging picture book I have ever read. it required far more focus than I had. (  ) ELiz_M | Apr 6, 2013 |  My friend Todd recommended this to me. It was very gripping, but in a subtle way, with is disassociative first-person narrative technique & it's oblique lens on history & memory. (  ) allyshaw | Apr 4, 2013 | A different kind of WWII novel, focused on the experience of a child rescued from Nazi Germany and his later confusion and search for his roots. I'm not sure at this point why I didn't like it more. ( ) auntieknickers | Apr 3, 2013 | A história de Jacques Austerlitz é descrita como uma história do holocausto, e foi por causa da invasão alemã à Praga que ele é enviado ao País de Gales e cresce com a sensação de não pertencer a lugar algum, e é entre os sobreviventes de guetos de judeus e comunistas que ele procura seus pais. Mas o holocausto é o pano de fundo, o motivo pelo qual ele quer esquecer seu passado antes de desconfiar do que pode ter vivido, mas também o motivo pelo qual depois quer saber, quer encontrar o rosto da mãe entre os vídeos de judeus em um gueto tcheco. Um fraturado fluxo de consciência sobre memória, perda, história e esquecimento. (  ) JuliaBoechat | Mar 30, 2013 | 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. ( ) HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 |
 He is one of the most gripping writers imaginable. It's not the story so much that takes hold of the reader: it's the descriptions and the meditations, which can be hallucinatory in their effect. This is true of all his books, but in Austerlitz the proportion of rumination and evocation to narrative is larger than ever.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375756566, Paperback)If the mark of a great novel is that it creates its own world, drawing in the reader with its distinctive rhythms and reverberations, then W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz may be the first great novel of the new century. An unnamed narrator, resting in a waiting room of the Antwerp rail station in the late 1960s, strikes up a conversation with a student of architecture named Austerlitz, about whom he knows almost nothing. Over the next several years, the narrator often runs into his odd, engaging acquaintance by chance on his travels, until finally, after a gap of two decades, Austerlitz decides to tell the narrator the story of his life and of his search for his origins in wartime Europe. Slow and meditative, relying on the cumulative effect of its sedate, musical prose and its dark subject matter (illuminated here and there with hope), Sebald's novel doesn't overturn the conventions of fiction, but transcends them. It is a love story to history and vanished beauty. Don't let the slow beginning turn you away. Austerlitz takes its time getting off the ground, but is well worth seeing in flight. --Regina Marler(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:30:55 -0500) "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."--BOOK JACKET.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
 Google Books — Loading...
Popular coversRatingAverage: (4.22)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
1