Roger Brunyate's Reviews > Austerlitz

After the Holocaust

This extraordinary book is the inner narrative of an elderly adopted Englishman trying to recapture a childhood shattered by the Holocaust, and to come to grips with the resultant sickness of postwar Europe. But this Freudian search is firmly rooted in the detail of everyday things: a childhood in Wales, curiosities of natural history, old photographs, the architecture of railroad stations. Its multi-layered narrative style, almost devoid of paragraphs, keeps you at a distance yet sucks you in; this is a person one is glad to know, and his half-formed memories resonate with one's own. I was half-way through the book before I realized that it was a translation from the German, brilliantly handled by Anthea Bell; but translation seems appropriate to a work which is itself a work of translation; Sebald's evocative words and images seem written simultaneously in one's own tongue and in another that is forever foreign.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my own first career, like that of the title character, was as an architectural historian, my early schooling was also at a private establishment on the Welsh borders, and many of Austerlitz' viewpoints and experiences (though not of course his early childhood in Nazi Europe) closely parallel my own. I cannot guarantee that readers from other backgrounds will feel such close identification with either Austerlitz or the book's unnamed narrator—except that one of the qualities which distinguishes a great novelist (as I believe Sebald to be) is the ability to make the reader identify with a character, no matter how different his background may be from one's own.

If interested, see also my comparison of this book to D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel, another book that approaches the Holocaust from an unexpected angle, there explicitly Freudian.