W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)

It has been many years since I read Sebald and I had forgotten how melancholy his writing is. That he is talented is without question. This recounting of the (fictional) lives of four German emigrants is almost unrelentingly depressing. The four stories that Sebald constructs are, for the most part, quite believable…even to the point of making me wonder on occasion if he isn’t simply telling non-fiction stories. But each one also has a few twists that struck me as not quite believable show more and reiterated that this is, in fact, fiction. Each story, in its way, addresses concerns of trauma and isolation, memory and belonging. I am not quite certain what it is about Sebald’s voice (in addition to his settings) that makes the overall effect so cheerless but I find it both consistent and compelling, in its way. One point that I think is essential to make is that the translation (into British, as opposed to U.S., English) is superb. I can’t read German and so have no way to compare but I find that Michael Hulse’s rendering is really quite extraordinary. show less

No ellipsis, no full stop, no new paragraph

For years I read and re-read Rings of Saturn and in the back of my mind was this idea that I should sit down next time and unpick a Sebald passage as the action, images and metaphors transition on the page. I wanted to work out the mechanics, the way he shifts the narrative, slipping in a new line of thinking while we the reader are busy absorbing another immediately before it. But catching a fleeting Sebald transition is like catching motes, tiny show more illuminations that in reality are the detritus of the world around us, cleaved off the forms that contained them, entering the next phase of of their existence as proof of the entropy around us. They form a portion of the world, Sebald reforms these entropies into narrative. Destruction and decline are all around.

If this were a poem, stretched out on the page differently, we would never question its form, but note its rhythms and shifts like poetry. But in prose, it mystifies many into looking for categories to define it. It's fiction, get over it. It's a novel as a string of images using what can be researched as history as the matter it builds itself from. Others write about relationships, their dynamics, the moral choices made in them. Here the relationships are with the landscape, what is known about it, found in it, and how it reflects the inner world of the narrator newly discharged from a hospital.

I always thought this book was kind of impossible to review. Partly because I was so in awe of it, partly because reading it was like going on a road trip, getting to the end, realising you really should go back because the trip was so good, without being clear why. And along the way, everything happens in a blur, equivalent to watching scenery going past on a highway at speed, unable to settle the eye on anything. Even though you take in all the words, images, ideas.

The actual road trip in the book is a walk in East Anglia – all travel, history, movement. But the road trip is the simple narrative form; a convention used by many writers. What we witness from our car window reading is a brief glimpse at the walker’s experiences of morbidity and his accompanying perception of mortality. The unnamed narrator must be a historian, full of the events and episodes from which to draw connections to the workings of his mind. We are in a sense being guided through that experience. The morbid state follows a hospital discharge, in the psychological literature this is a risky time, of vulnerability and likely emotional decline. In morbid states, what else can we do but think about our vulnerability. It is all encompassing. When depressed we think only of the worst aspects of ourselves and our surroundings reproduce it. So history and place transform into the metaphorical thoughts of morbidity for our unnamed narrator. Nothing is accidental when you’re in a state like this. It all fits an internal logic. Stumbling upon the ever degrading eastern coastline of England or the receded glory of Lowestoft is not an accident. The mind guides us to those places as they reflect the inner world. The narrator is on foot. He engages with his landscape through the slow methodical movement of walking. We do not. Reading is like driving in a Sebald novel, we are moving to a destination with many stops, but always in motion. It can appear disorienting. By the time we arrive, we have passed what we see.

But how does Sebald move us around the place? It keeps eluding me. Like trying to catch a herring or a sardine in my bare hands. There you go, herrings. Slipping that in there, herring was preceded by the word ‘like’. So you see how I produced that little simile on the page. But how does Sebald bring up herring? He has a lot to say about this once plentiful fish and its place in European commercial history.

Before there is a signpost, we are already there. We are travelling south from Lowestoft along the sea witnessing the slowly declining population of solitary beach fishermen camped for a day or a night under some desperately inadequate cover. The thoughts of the recently discharged narrator draw him into what he sees:

The fact is that today it is almost impossible to catch anything fishing from the beach.

The narrator connects to these desolate souls, echoing his own internal state:

They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

It wasn’t always like this. Emptiness and solitude give way to a brief history of abundance and a time when human industry tamed nature. The narrator muses that catches are getting smaller, toxins and chemicals pollute the catch so that even what is caught is not quite what it should be. Then the line mid paragraph:

It was not without reason that the herring was always a popular didactic model in primary school … of the indestructibility of nature.

Suddenly, we are introduced to the meaning of this metaphor – a period of growth and abundance. Abundance is like the experience before we are let down. Before our moribund state, we had power to influence. What does a herring metaphor for abundance look like?

…in 1857, that untold millions of herring rise from the lightless depths in the spring and summer months, to spawn in coastal waters and shallows, where they lie one on top of another in layers.

There is confidence and power in this 19thC surfeit. Until we find that there are so many herrings that tidal or wind change can bring so many into shore to beach themselves that the local people were unable to harvest enough of this glut that rots two feet deep for miles along the shore.

Waste, like the loss of our vitality perhaps gives rise to morbidity. A mishap, an accident, a force of nature renders us supine. Prey to our thoughts they feed on themselves.

Herring hold so many facets of meaning for a narrator carrying around thoughts of personal decline. The mental space of self-destructive thoughts mirrors the death of the herring:


Once the life has fled the herring, its colour changes. Its back turns blue, the cheeks and gills red, suffused with blood. An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet to altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays.

We can experience brief moments of life, or the appearance of life, even when we know our decline is coming. They can carry us for a while as though they are hope. But the moribund mind can’t accept hope for long.

We leave the herring, as we encountered them, contained in a parenthesis between thoughts of lonely fishermen seeking to catch what is not there, not caring about the catch, because caring would be to suffer.

I had long left the beach fishermen behind me when…

And so, Sebald has caught an idea and brought it out, trapped in a particular mental form, an idea within a state of mind reflecting itself over and over. Next we move to a great stone manor house in Henstead, and another parenthesis containing such thoughts. The landscape and the history contained within it will continue to reflect the interior of the narrator’s mind.

There is little warning when we arrive at the next image, metaphor, action, not even a paragraph. It’s as though we’ve sped past it in a car, and barely noticed. Yet strangely feel enriched by it. show less

This is the second time I’ve read this novel; the first time was soon after its publication in rh U.S. The book haunted me for reasons I couldn’t articulate. So, I thought it would be a good choice for my book club under the theme of “Memory." It proved to be the most controversial book in my three years of moderating this group.

The unnamed narrator is a man without a country, wandering through Europe studying architecture. In a railway station, he makes an acquaintance with a man who show more introduces himself as Austerlitz.

Sebald does away with plot, characterization, dialogue, and events leading to other events. What we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice.
Austerlitz is on a quest to find out who he is. What he recounts to the narrator is a reconstructive odyssey in search of himself. The two men encounter each other, seemingly by coincidence, again and again in their respective travels, always discussing architecture and history, but sharing nothing of their personal lives until 1996 when their conversation finally turns to Austerlitz’s life history.

The incredible power of this book is how Sebald tells the story and layers the subtext to a point that it requires re-reading with intense attention to every detail. Sebald combats the erasure of history on the collective level as well as the individual. What the Nazis take from Austerlitz is not his life or property but his essential personhood. The traumatic effects of separation are not felt by Austerlitz until the distractions of study and career are cleared away, exposing the emptiness of his disconnected, dislocated existence.

The photographs, unannotated throughout, are part of what makes this novel so powerful and haunting, perhaps because photographs are so evocative and unaffected by the passage of time—except for the fading. The photos give us the impression of a memoir, but some of them have no connection to the prose, yet we, as the reader, are always looking for the pattern. The Nocturama and its accompanying photos of the monkey, the owl, Wittgenstein, and another man set the tone for the conceit of fake realities, which include the false reality of Austerlitz’s own childhood, the horrific distortion of reality by the Nazis, and the false universe of the Holocaust. Sebald says, “This recourse to peripherality (the photographs) arises partly as a narrative strategy to cope with the inherent unrepresentability of that which occurred in the Nazi concentration camps.”

Central to understanding this novel is the reader's understanding that Sebald is German but not Jewish. He is the narrator; he is not Austerlitz. He writes as he does to cope with the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded him growing up in Germany. His father worked in the Nazi machine. Sebald’s conviction: “This is not so much a way of understanding the Holocaust, so much as it is a way of making us think about how we can’t understand the Holocaust.” This book is a combination of memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography. show less

In 1967, our unnamed narrator meets Jacques Austerlitz for the first time at Antwerp Central Station where they share a discussion on the finer points of the architectural structure and historical significance of the same. Austerlitz is a lecturer of art history at a college in London with a passionate interest in the architectural history of heritage sites and buildings which is made more obvious through the numerous lengthy and detailed descriptions of the buildings and places visited show more throughout the narrative. Over the next thirty years they continue to meet irregularly in different locations throughout Europe and Austerlitz shares fragments of the story of his life and background with our narrator.

In 1939, four-year-old Jacque Austerlitz arrived in Britain on kindertransport from Czechoslovakia and was taken in by Calvinist preacher and former missionary, Emyr Elias and his wife who lived in a manse in Bala, Wales. He has almost no memories of his life before that and is only made aware of this part of his origin in 1949 by the headmaster of the private school near Oswestry he had been attending since 1946. He is told that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz and not Dafydd Elias, the name given to him by his foster parents. Unfortunately, his foster parents pass on before he can garner any further details from them.

“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.”

Jacques finds support and companionship in André Hilary , teacher of history at his school who later assists in his naturalization process and a younger student, Gerald Fitzpatrick , their friendship lasting the duration of Gerald’s lifetime till his untimely death many years later. He holds fond memories of his many visits to the Andromeda Lodge in Barmouth with Gerald where Gerald’s naturalist Uncle and Grand-uncle fuel his fascination with landscapes and nocturnal insects and birds, moths in particular.

“Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?”

Much of the prose is dedicated to our protagonist Austerlitz’s fascination with and descriptions of old buildings, railway stations and heritage sites. Throughout the narrative, the author gives subtle hints to the protagonist’s search for links to his past as he describes the history of the various places and buildings he visits in Europe. When he finds an unused waiting room in Liverpool Station he experiences a vivid flash of memory of a younger version himself in that waiting room with his rucksack (he is seen to carry a rucksack with him on all his travels) and his foster parents receiving him at the station. When he hears a radio broadcast about children brought to Britain via kindertransport he starts piecing his family history together. His search leads him to Prague where he finds Vera, who had been his nanny while a student at Prague University and was also his mother’s friend and neighbor. Speaking to Vera, he starts to recollect fragmented memories of his childhood, the adjoining area and the language. Vera informs him that his father, Maximilian Aychenwald, had left for Paris just before the Nazi occupation of Prague preceding his family who was to join him later but was never heard from again. His mother, Agata, a singer and actress from an affluent family had stayed on after he was sent to Britain only to have all her assets confiscated and herself transported with others to Theresienstadt. The narrative progresses with Austerlitz’s travels and research into the fate of his parents and the toll of his discoveries on his mental and physical well-being as is shared with the narrator.

“We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.”

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald is not an easy book to review. To be honest, I find reviewing the book more complicated than it was to read. At the center of the novel is the Holocaust and Jacques Austerlitz , displaced from his family in an effort to save him from a far worse fate. Combining fact and fiction, the author, instead of going into graphic detail about the horrors of the death camps and the plight of the detainess , discusses the injustices of that period and the impact of the same in post war Europe , but in a more restrained tone. Life in the ghettos and camps , looting of possessions, displacement of families and the ultimate fate of those sent to locations further “east” are alluded to but in connection to Jacque Austerlitz’s story and his research into existing records and documentation that would give him more information on his parents’ respective fates, which takes place almost half a century after the events. Particularly poignant was his discovery of an abridged version of a Nazi propaganda film on the Theresienstadt ghetto to which his mother had been sent and his remastering of it to a fourth of its original speed in which he searches for a glimpse of his mother of whom he has faint recollection. Austerlitz is a deep, meditative and thought-provoking novel about a man searching for his true identity and his exploration of past events of which he has but a fleeting memory. We bear witness to the protagonist’s efforts in finding a sense of belongingness in a world that he observes and interprets but more often than not feels detached from.

The narrative progresses at a slow pace, at times excruciatingly slow, with a deep melancholic tone that is reinforced by old black and white photographs of landscapes, ruins, architecture and much more interspersed throughout the prose. The passages are long and the complex sentences are often hard to follow. I did have to go back and reread parts of the narrative more than once. The longest sentence spanning roughly eight pages is that in which the protagonist shares his description of , and observations on, his visit to Theresienstadt. Brilliant and beautiful in its complexity, Austerlitz, the novel, is an immersive experience that is well worth the time invested. show less