I quickly got used to the style of long, long sentences and no paragraphs or chapters and this way of writing worked very well for the book. An engrossing read about Austerlitz and his search for his family, which he started late in life. He tells this tale to the writer of the book and occasionally this style is a little clumsy. A deep book that muses on different and varied subjects, but is never boring. ( )

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. ( )

I need to read this again, and also more Sebald in general. It's one of the most haunting, mysterious, visceral books I have ever read about a man's identity in a post-war Europe. ( )

This curious book has more of an ethereal quality than any I have read in years. It starts off with an elaborate frame. The unnamed narrator travels from England to Belgium several times on business, and each time he notices a solitary man taking pictures of the train station and writing elaborate notes. Driven by curiosity, he approaches the man, Austerlitz, and the two develop a long-lasting friendship.

Gradually, the novel devolves into Austerlitz’s story of his search for his roots in Prague in the middle of the 1930s. His mother evacuated him to England at the age of 12 to live with a Welsh minister and his wife. Austerlitz remembers nothing of his family and his childhood, but his obsession with architecture provides fleeting glimpses of his past.

It took a while to get use to Sebald’s unusual style. Some paragraphs go on for ten or more pages. Only a few breaks in the narrative occur marked by a single star centered on the page. This proved no problem, because as Austerlitz’s story progressed – with incredible descriptive detail – I could scarcely stop reading this meditation on art, architecture, and psychology.

In addition to long paragraphs, Sebald uses long sentences. Here is an example of his style:

“As I lay down I turned on the radio set standing on the wine crate beside the bed. The names of cities and radio stations with which I used to link the most exotic ideas in my childhood appeared on its round, illuminated dial – Monte Ceneri, Rome, Ljubljana, Stockholm, Beromünster, Hilversum, Prague and others besides. I turned the volume down very low and listened to a language I did not understand drifting in the air from a great distance: a female voice, which was sometimes lost in the ether, but then emerged again and mingled with the performance of two careful hands moving, in some place unknown to me, over the keyboard of a Bösendorfer or Pleyel and playing certain musical passages, I think from the Well-Tempered Clavier, which accompanied me far into the realms of slumber” (165).

This passage, and many others, provide clues to Austerlitz, as he begins to piece his past back together.

In addition, photographs are interspersed throughout the book that relate to people, places, and architecture referred to in the texts. These ghostly images from the past and present add to the ethereal quality I mentioned above.

I see more of Sebald’s works in my future. 5 stars

--Jim, 5/26/09 ( )

W.G. Sebald's "Austerlitz" is an odd, otherworldly book whose detached, meandering prose conceals awful truths and unspeakable horrors. At times it seems to talk about everything but the Holocaust, but that is actually where its true power lies. Through its forays into such seemingly unrelated topics as zoos and architecture, "Austerlitz" is in fact rebuilding vanished people out of the troubled landscape of twentieth-century Europe. ("These fragments I have shored against my ruins." - T.S. Eliot.) The title character, before commencing his quest to recreate his lost past, has failed to recognize the precedent to mass murder set in "the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts and penal institutions, railways and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwellings built to rectangular grid patterns for the labor force." Austerlitz is only dimly aware of "an impulse which he himself, to this day, did not really understand, but which was somehow linked to his early fascination with the idea of a network such as that of the entire railway system." Although the theme of the Holocaust does eventually emerge, like "the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world," Sebald's novel is also a voyage through the haunted miasma that continually hovers over Europe as it attempts to evolve beyond its terrible past.

The feeling I got from "Austerlitz" was truly one of gray skies, industrial ruin, and empty plains. It was the Gothic ambiance of, say, Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" or Brontë's "Wuthering Heights," but without the romanticism and tragic splendor. In the wake of two World Wars and several genocides, misery can no longer be made painfully beautiful. It can only be as Austerlitz standing alone "in a kind of trance on the platform of the bleak station at Holesovice, [where] the railway lines ran away into infinity on both sides." Or, in the words of T.S. Eliot, writing already in 1925: "The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms." It is like the panorama he described in "The Waste Land," following what everyone thought could only be the War to End All Wars. But here no redemptive rain falls, though there is still growth "feeding / A little life with dried tubers." Austerlitz relearns his parents' names, recovers his native tongue, is reacquainted with his old nursemaid, and visits his family's old home in the Prague. It is better than the "nothing again nothing" that he wore like a lead cloak; he no longer has to continue on that worn stage against a faded backdrop and dusty set, for he has regained his submerged identity.

Despite my difficulties reading Faulkner, "Austerlitz" really did echo "Absalom! Absalom!," a story of the likewise historically haunted American South, which also featured the detective work of reconstructing a tragic past amid the crumbling plaster and overgrown fields of a dead plantation. In fact, it has often intrigued me that the Spanish words for "story" and "history," historia and historía respectively, are identical except for a single accent. To record history is indeed to sort through a multitude of individual accounts and physical evidences and then to assemble these into a coherent narrative with cause, effect, and conclusion. That is also why I believe Sebald chose to write fiction: because he could illuminate and elucidate that hidden humanity that often overpowers pure objective fact. A textbook is not a novel. Both have their distinct purposes: one to educate, the other to educate and humanize. ( )