Product Description
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Aus-terlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.

Amazon.com Review
If the mark of a great novel is that it creates its own world, drawing in the reader with its distinctive rhythms and reverberations, then W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz may be the first great novel of the new century. An unnamed narrator, resting in a waiting room of the Antwerp rail station in the late 1960s, strikes up a conversation with a student of architecture named Austerlitz, about whom he knows almost nothing. Over the next several years, the narrator often runs into his odd, engaging acquaintance by chance on his travels, until finally, after a gap of two decades, Austerlitz decides to tell the narrator the story of his life and of his search for his origins in wartime Europe. Slow and meditative, relying on the cumulative effect of its sedate, musical prose and its dark subject matter (illuminated here and there with hope), Sebald's novel doesn't overturn the conventions of fiction, but transcends them. It is a love story to history and vanished beauty. Don't let the slow beginning turn you away. Austerlitz takes its time getting off the ground, but is well worth seeing in flight. --Regina Marler

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 73 reviews)

Disappointment.

As a person who will read anything within my reach, I find it shocking to find myself unable to get through a book. Austerlitz is stagnant, pedantic, and relentlessly dull; the entire work seems to be without affect. I cannot imagine that those who gave it such high regard actually read it. They probably just assume that anything too inaccessible to actually read and enjoy holds literary value. The book meanders aimlessly throughout the years and the cities, touching on what should be some of the most profoundly affecting issues of the human condition -- genocide, identity, family, abandonment-- and manages to make them all gray and emotionless.
February 13, 2008

First hiding from, then searching for time lost

'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.
December 30, 2007

Like a Poetic Dream

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.
October 27, 2007

Familiar Tale But Now Told By An Artist

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.

September 30, 2007

European Writing at its Finest

There are enough well written reviews here to convince readers of the late Sebald's beauty, lyricism, and dream-like lure as a writer. Austerlitz is in my opinion his most beautiful and profound book, though I've yet to read Vertigo. Simply stated, it's his labour of love, and you will come away from the book an altogether different reader and observer. If you're a diarist or a writer of any sort, I promise you will close this book and return to page one and begin again. His long, beautiful sentences will remind readers of Europeans' old-world sensibility; their sense of history and time and of those who have come before us.
August 25, 2007

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

The Emigrants
by W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse

The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
by Michael Hulse

Vertigo
by Winfried Georg Sebald, W. G. Sebald
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On the Natural History of Destruction (Modern Library Paperbacks)
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After Nature (Modern Library Paperbacks)
by W.G. Sebald