Austerlitz Sebald Review

Austerlitz Sebald
Review #1
Austerlitz is unusual in a number of ways. The actual layout of the text is markedly different from that of most novels: there are only 25 widely spaced lines to the page. There are no paragraphs anywhere in the book, and no chapters in the usual sense; there are only a handful of inverted commas for speech. And there are quite a number of photographs dispersed through the text, photographs which Sebald seems to have taken himself.
As for what the book is about: well, no brief account is going to do the work any sort of justice; you will just have to try it and see if it appeals to you. But basically this book is about the life of Jacques Austerlitz, born in 1939, sent to England, and placed with foster parents in Wales. Eventually he becomes an architectural historian, and in his retirement he begins to explore what happened to him more than fifty years earlier. This exploration inevitably reveals much about Sebald's attitude to European history in general and German history in particular.
All Sebald’s work, both in fiction and in academic life, seems to have been related to the German reluctance (as Sebald saw it) to come to terms with the events which occurred in the time of the Third Reich. As such, Sebald’s output, both ‘fictional’ and academic, undoubtedly has a lasting significance. Its importance was recognised during his lifetime by a number of awards.
But will you actually enjoy Austerlitz? I can only say that it did not grip me as I hoped it might. It is, after all, a literary work, and my blind spots in that area are well known. At all stages of my reading, however, I was conscious that I was in the presence of someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do, and how to do it. Austerlitz would, I suspect, repay a more careful reading than I felt able to give it.
Review #2
Jacques Austerlitz is a fellow academic met on one of the narrator's travels. He was a five-year-old refugee during the Second World War. His parents sent him to Britain as the Nazis closed in on Prague. They didn't escape. He ended up in provincial Wales, living in a vicarage as Dafydd Elias. It wasn't until his school days, just before he took some exams, that he was told his real name and origin. Although the narrator is also an exile, he seems to need Austerlitz to act as a conduit for his own search, like a novelist would use a character. Most of the words in the novel are Austerlitz's, with the narrator adding the occasional "said Austerlitz" to remind us. For the rest of the novel, Austerlitz tells his story, which means the story of his search for the story of his life: "I have never known who I really was" he says.

He tells the narrator that it wasn't until he had met him that he was able to approach his past. Before then, he says, "an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, had always preserved me from my own secret". With the narrator there to listen, the brain's mechanism is disabled and Austerlitz is finally able to confront the fate of his parents. Mutual need arises out of shared interests. And as a result, there seems to be little difference between Austerlitz and the narrator. In recalling the novel, it is easy to conflate the two. Although this is a common enough thing in reading novels, here the suspension of disbelief is slackened because one is not convinced of the distinction.

Both the narrator and Austerlitz spend time describing events in their lives in which, with curious regularity, they "lose themselves" in reveries of engagement or nauseous confusion. Indeed, it happens in all Sebald's novels; the first is even titled after such an episode: Vertigo. It's as if these moments stand in place of the revelations the characters are seeking. For example, Austerlitz loses himself in the small print of works he is reading in a Paris library as he seeks references to his father. He doesn't find any details but discovers, instead, "the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications" as he calls it. Rather than finding conclusions, the possibilities become almost infinite. He is released, albeit briefly, from his obscure torment. Perhaps this is why the narrator and his friend are so similar: they need just a glimmer of otherness to illuminate their individual darknesses.

We too experience this in the otherwise inexplicable use of photographs and drawings throughout Sebald's novels. In the many reviews of the novel, very little has been made of them, perhaps it is assumed they are merely illustrative. Yet as they are uncaptioned, the reader instinctively wonders what the connection is between them and the words. It creates one's own moment of vertigo. This had a tremendous effect in The Emigrants, Sebald's second novel (though the first to be published). For those new to his work, it will probably have the same affect. However, by this, the fourth time, the power is diminished. Wonder becomes indifference. The same goes for the character of Austerlitz himself. His similarity to the reticent narrator means he is similarly opaque despite speaking for the most of the 418 unparagraphed pages.

Yes, you read correctly. There are 418 pages without a paragraph break. This a famous aspect of the work of the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, for whom Sebald has professed great admiration. Bernhard, however, created unforgettable characters even if they seem indistinguishable from the morose author. Perhaps it is significant that not one of Bernhard's novels is named after the main character (that is, if one understands Wittgenstein's Nephew as autobiography). It suggests that Sebald's concern in Austerlitz is for the mystery of suppressed histories, not for attacking the suppression with vituperative glee, like Bernhard. In both uses of unrelenting monologue, the question of what's being left out is begged. In Bernhard this has a painfully comic affect, while here it is more tragic. Sebald's empathy is thwarted as a result because, like Austerlitz's own attempt to get closer to what remains unclear to him, it always produces "varied and impenetrable ramifications". That Austerlitz is an imagined character reasserts the fact, and indicates that the novel as an art form suppresses as much as it illuminates, no matter how much light is beamed into the darkness. The "war against cliché" like the other war it alludes to, is a fighting on the wrong front. Austerlitz's opacity, then, is perhaps artistically necessary. If this is the case, it makes this novel at once a success - at least on its own terms - and a prelude to an impasse.

With Austerlitz, Sebald has continued a remarkable run. He has produced four fascinating, often mesmering, novels in almost as many years. They are all far more interesting than those on this year's Booker Prize shortlist. Yet one wonders how he will continue to dramatise the confrontation with what always resists direct approach without becoming boring and predictable.