Glenn Russell's Reviews > Austerlitz

“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Turning the pages of the novel Austerlitz makes for one powerful, emotionally wrenching experience. Here's what esteemed critic Michiko Kakutani wrote as part of her New York Times review: "We are transported to a memoryscape - a twilight, fogbound world of half-remembered images and ghosts that is reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Kafka's troubling fables of guilt and apprehension and, of course, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.''

With his lyrical, poetic language, German born W. G. Sebald reminds me of the Nobel prize winning French author Patrick Modiano. Mr. Sebald blends fact and fiction in his tale of an unnamed narrator meeting and befriending a historian of European architecture by the name of Jacques Austerlitz. Also included are more than six dozen photographs along with a number of illustrations and charts.

The more we come to know Austerlitz in his recounting of his past, how he arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee, age four, from Nazi infested Czechoslovakia, how he was adopted and raised by an older Welsh minister and his wife, how, as an adult, he returned to Prague and located a close friend of his vanished mother and father, how he then further traced the fate of his parents, the more our hearts open not only to Austerlitz and his family but all the many men and women and children who suffered the brutality and madness of the Nazis.

I suspect one reason Mr. Sebald included the many black and white photographs as part of his novel goes back to what art critic Robert Hughes noted about the Holocaust: photography captured the ghastliness of the atrocities in a way other forms of art could not. In an attempt to retain the tone of this deeply moving literary work, I have included black and white photographs of my own choosing to accompany direct quotes from the novel.



"It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other. And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad."



"As it was, I recognized him by the rucksack of his, and for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago."



"After ninety seconds in which to defend yourself to a judge you could be condemned to death for a trifle, some offense barely worth mentioning, the merest contravention of the regulations in force, and then you would be hanged immediately in the execution room next to the law court, where there was an iron rail running along the ceiling down where the lifeless bodies where pushed a little further as required."



"Most of them were silent, some wept quietly, but outbursts of despair, loud shouting and fits of frenzied rage were not uncommon."



“The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”



"The longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”