 "I don't know why this book is rated so high" | 2009-09-05 |
| - Reviewed By englishspadeslover |
| I bought this book because of the high ratings and my interest in history and holocaust stories and survivors. I don't know what book the others were reading but I couldn't even finish this book it was soo boring and dull. I tried really hard to get into this book but I just couldn't. I did just see another review saying that you may have to give it several chances so I may try this one again. |
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 "Photographs illuminating the intersection between memory and writing" | 2008-12-29 |
| - Reviewed By alysson_oliveira |
In one of his last interviews for a British newspaper, German writer W. G. Sebald (who died too early in 2001), says that `your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing'. In his last novel, "Austerlitz", the author exploits this intersection: when writing searches in memory - of whom is writing and also of whom is reading - fragments to compose a narrative.
"Austerlitz" comes as a crossing between Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" and Marcel Proust's "Remembrance Things Past". Details are the start of a flood of memories from the title-character. But this is also a novel on the search of an identity. The protagonist was sent to England when he was four and his country, Czechoslovak, was taken by Germans.
While growing up, he thought of being the son of a Protestant pastor in Wales. Only later will he find out his real name is Jacques Austerlitz. At school, he is supposed to use this name in his exams - but his friends will keep calling him by his old name, and so will his teachers, although they know the truth about it. This is a broken identity, in which a name is heavier than the present moment, therefore, the search for the past is such an important matter. Memories are important - not just those we can remember, but also those lost deep inside our minds.
Sebald's books are a combination between fiction, historical research, journalism and photograph. This last element fascinates the writer and his reader. Austerlitz's story is comprehensibly illustrated with black-and-white pictures. At first, they seem to appear out of the blue, only to bring some breath between each extremely long paragraph, but as the narrative progresses, they start to make sense. It is one of the readers' tasks to decipher the relationship between photograph and text.
There is a narrator who could either be Austerliz himself or the reader - it is never clear, and it is not important to be. This is just a detail. The strength in "Austerlitz" comes from its emotional resonance, its quest for who is this man - his journey as personal as it is has a universal appeal.
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| "A Bleak and Terrible Beauty" | 2008-12-04 |
| - Reviewed By User: AXRSKNDTK0WXP |
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 historÃa 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. |
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| "First hiding from, then searching for time lost" | 2007-12-31 |
| - Reviewed By duibuqi |
'And I remember, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that it was Aunt Otylie who taught you...'. This quote encapsulates the narrative technique of the book nicely. Austerlitz tells his story to the unnamed narrator, who is a German living in England, like Sebald.
I bought this pocket book by mistake in a 3 for 2 sale, only knowing that it had been selected as book of the year in England some time before, but being unaware that it was first written in German. Well, no problem, the original can hardly be better than Anthea Bell's translation.
It is a masterpiece of modern European fiction, crossing borders of time and of languages. Jacques Austerlitz is born in Prague in the 30s, son of an opera singer (who loves Jacques Offenbach, another border crosser, which inspires the name choice for the boy)and a politician. When the German army occupies Czechoslowakia in 39, his parents send him on a train to safety in England. He is 4 and a half years old. He gets taken in by an unhappy Welsh couple. He learns only in boarding school what his real name is. He hides from researching his past, though there are initial thoughts of Napoleon, obviously, and Fred Astaire, less obviously.
Only after retiring from a career as art history teacher does he start exploring it, prompted by memories in a railway station. He finds his nanny in Prague and remembers his childhood language...
Very innovative narrative style, using fotos and excursions into seemingly unrelated subjects, like entomology or historical architecture.
Puzzling: my pocket book edition quotes the Times as comparing Sebald to Joyce, calls him the Joyce of the 21st century. Did the man read the book at all? If a comparison is needed at all, which is questionable, then I should think it must be Proust. |
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 "Like a Poetic Dream" | 2007-10-27 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1VZJ12X392B1K |
| With only a few paragraph breaks in the entire book, this one reads like a poetic dream. Saturated with images, a bit cool and detached, it moves along in pictures more than plot. For this reason, it took me awhile to get captured by the story (for seemingly, there was none). Even then, I was driven more by the potential plots in my head than by any that Sebald had woven. So. If you love a good poem, dig in. In you prefer a good plot, move on. |
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| "Familiar Tale But Now Told By An Artist" | 2007-09-30 |
| - Reviewed By northerneagle |
Part of the enjoyment of this book is the discovery of the story, and I would strongly recommend that one skip the reviews and simply read the book and discover yourself what exactly the novel is about, and then read the comments later. I read nothing until I finished the book. It is an interesting novel that I recommend.
I read some of the professional reviews and one claimed that he had never read such a story about a holocaust survivor. That might be true but also it is not true. This might be one of the best fictional stories, but the non-fiction story is not new and many holocaust survivors from Europe are still alive in their seventies and eighties and one can still here their stories first hand. One can visit museums and read numerous non-fiction accounts and see old film. There are many biographies such as Swimming Across: A Memoir by Andrew S. Grove who described the horrors of life in Budapest during the war and his subsequent march across the border to freedom as a youth.
What Sebald has done here is to create a story or novel that has an artistic slant. Without giving away the plot details he uses the vehicle of a voyage of discovery by a man who was sent to the United Kingdom by train in his youth at age five to escape the war. The boy, Austerliz, whose picture is on the front of the hardcover version has a memory block but when he becomes older he returns to discover his past life in Prague and the horrors of his parents' fate.
Sebald tells the story with artistic prose and with in the insertion of photographs. He tries to create an atmosphere where the characteristics of animals and people are blurred and human actions are viewed as animal like set among German efficiency and planning - which he reveals later in the story. He starts off describing animals in captivity and the similarity with people in rail stations - the great stations of Europe. He goes on until the real intent of the plot emerges after 50 to 100 pages. At that point it changes from a philosophical and a wandering story into a compelling read supported with dramatic and artistic prose.
The novel is interesting and the use of photographs is a powerful technique. The book has a number of other interesting literary twists.
Recommend: 5 stars.
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