Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald
Summary
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, tells his life story in fragments to an unnamed narrator he keeps meeting by chance in railway stations and cafes across Europe over three decades. Raised in Wales by a strict Calvinist minister and his wife, who never told him his real name, Austerlitz learns as a teenager that he arrived in Britain in 1939 on a Kindertransport train from Prague, and the novel follows him back through Oxford, a breakdown, and eventually to Prague itself, where an old family friend named Vera tells him what she remembers of his mother Agata, an actress deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and of his father Maximilian, who fled to Paris and disappeared. Austerlitz searches archives, a Nazi propaganda film shot at Theresienstadt, and the vast reading room of the new Bibliotheque nationale de France, built, he comes to believe, on the site of a wartime depot where the Nazis stored goods looted from deported Jews. He never finds a grave, a date or a body, only fragments that confirm his parents were both destroyed by the same machine that separated him from them as an infant. The book ends without resolution, its narrator recalling a memoir by Dan Jacobson about a vanished grandfather, one more account of a search that circles a loss too large to close.
Sebald writes in enormous, winding sentences, sometimes running unbroken for pages, with grainy uncaptioned photographs dropped into the text as if they were evidence rather than illustration. It reads slowly and demands real patience, offering almost no dialogue and no chapter breaks, and that difficulty is inseparable from what the book is arguing: memory does not resolve into a story with an ending, and neither does this one.
Historical Context & Significance
Austerlitz won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2001 and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize in 2002, along with the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Anthea Bell's translation. It won no major British prize such as the Booker, for which translated fiction was not then eligible, and no Pulitzer. Sebald was widely tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and died in a car accident in Norfolk in December 2001, at fifty seven, months after the novel's English publication.
His death cut short a career that had already reshaped how English language critics thought the novel and the essay could combine, and Austerlitz is now often named his masterwork and read as a capstone to earlier books including The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants. Susan Sontag and others championed his work before his death, and its reputation has only grown since, with critics and novelists continuing to cite its patient, indirect method of approaching the Holocaust as a model few writers have matched.