Book of the month 2003

© Penguin

In the "salle des pas perdus", a gloomy train station in Antwerp, the narrator in the first person notices a man: almost youthful, blonde, with heavy walking boots, blue dungarees, carrying a worn-out rucksack, who is intently preoccupied with making notes and sketches in a copybook. A conversation about historical architecture ensues which marks the first of many encounters, often many years apart, between the narrator and this stranger. They talk about train stations, fortifications, garrisons, torture chambers and observatories, of architectural styles, their origins and historical significance, while the thoroughly researched elucidations reveal fragments of the life story of this strange loner.

He grew up as Dafydd Elias in a dreary, loveless, and isolated parson's household in Wales, until finally, at the age of eight, he entered a Preparatory School where he was able to satisfy his hunger for learning. After the death of the couple who he had assumed were his parents, the by now fifteen year old learns that his real name is Jacques Austerlitz. The word "Austerlitz" means nothing to him, and he is totally bewildered by the sudden change of his perceived origins.

Under his new name he devotes himself to the study of Natural Science and becomes an expert on homing pigeons ("... who find their way home even with broken wings!"), butterflies and moths. He studies the stars with the same intensity as man-made buildings; he researches historical connections, and documents his conclusions with detailed pictorial records. The suppression of everything that is personal, and the relentless self-censorship of his thoughts, gradually turn him into an outsider and stranger, eventually paralysing all his creative power and even his ability to speak, until, in an accidentally overheard conversation, he picks up the trail which leads him to his early childhood. In Prague, he learns from his former governess the identity of his real parents: the young actress Agata Austerlizova and the republican Maximilian Aychenwald from St. Petersburg. Events in his childhood come to life again. He hears about the flight of his father to Paris and the horrendous suffering of his persecuted Jewish mother on her way to Theresienstadt concentration camp, after she had managed at the last minute to get her then less than five-year old boy included in a children's evacuation programme to England.

The mother's name, Austerlitz, is not dissimilar to Auschwitz, and it is also the name of the train station in Paris from where, in 1942, his father was probably sent to an internment camp. It is here, too, that the restless trail tracer Austerlitz takes leave of the narrator. His whole existence has been shaped by the pre-occupation with and later the overcoming of the past: in the beginning all his explorations ended with the period of the 19th century, while later, in the investigation of his own origins, he has to deal with the horror events of the 20th century.

The adolescent Austerlitz, who was not who he thought he was, who at first ignored the new persona pulled over him like a new skin but also tried to "delete" all other memories by numbing his mind with an encyclopaedic amount of knowledge, is eventually caught by his past: from the mist of his subconsciousness emerge shadows of reality through "premonitions" in certain places and coincidences which at last compel him to investigate his own past. In the same way as Austerlitz laboriously and slowly lifts the veil off his past does the reader get to know him only indirectly through the filtered perspective of the narrator. The author's involved style of writing is dominated by indirect speech, voluminous period sentences, often long-winded deliberations, special inversions, and sometimes multilingual vocabulary. Added to this is a universal set of symbols in the form of an artistic intertwinement of pictures, people and places. In a carefully crafted combination of essay, report, historical excursion, documentation and poetic reflection, carefully chosen individual episodes are masterfully formed into a perfect whole. Thus the reader is sucked into a whirlpool of interlocking events in the life of an uprooted individual and is spellbound by the indelible power of recollection.

Bibliografic Details
German	English Translation
Hardcover: Sebald, Winfried G.: Austerlitz. Carl Hanser, München,2001 ISBN 3-446-19986-1 EUR 23,50	Hardcover: Not available yet.
Paperback: Sebald, Winfried G.: Austerlitz. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2. Auf 2003 ISBN 3-596-14864-2 EUR 9,90	Paperback: Sebald, Winfried G.: Austerlitz. Penguin Books, London,2005 ISBN 0-14-102280-9 EUR 2,95
Audio-CD: Not available yet.	Audio-CD: Not available yet.