Austerlitz
A man in his sixties recovering a childhood that was taken from him, in one long unbroken current of talk.
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, falls into conversation with an unnamed narrator in a Belgian station in the 1960s, and over three decades of chance meetings he pieces together where he came from. Raised in Wales under a false name by a joyless minister and his wife, he has no access to his first years until a chance sound and a return to Liverpool Street station begin to loosen them. He learns he arrived in Britain as a small child on a train out of Prague, his parents left behind to the war.
Sebald renders this in a single continuous voice, the narrator relaying Austerlitz relaying others, so that the source of any memory stays uncertain. Photographs of stations, fortresses, and faces sit inside the prose without captions. For the clinician, the book tracks how a sealed-off history keeps acting on the body, and how it surfaces through place and sensation rather than will. The English translation appeared in 2001.
About the author
Winfried Georg Sebald
Winfried Georg Sebald (1944 to 2001) was a German writer and academic who spent most of his working life in England. He taught European literature at the University of East Anglia, where he later founded a centre for literary translation. He is known for Austerlitz, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo, works of prose fiction that weave together travel, history, and memory, and that set uncaptioned photographs alongside the text.
Details
- 2001
- German
- Modern Library
- Modern Library
- 320
- 9780812982619