Noel's Reviews > Austerlitz

“Even now, when I try to remember them, when I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk and read the words of the captions—Former Office, Printing Works, Huts, Jacques Ochs Hall, Solitary Confinement Cell, Mortuary, Relics Store, and Museum—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 of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”

I have to admit I was a little nervous at first. The novel is more than 400 pages with no chapters or even paragraphs. It felt like climbing a perpendicular rock face, with nothing to assist me but em-dashes on which to rest my feet. Much of the time, my eyes would dutifully go down each page, focusing briefly on every line, while my mind was many miles away. Then I’d do a double-take worthy of Wile E. Coyote and plunge into the abyss, arms flailing like a scarecrow in a windstorm, until the rope attached to my harness yanked me short.

Perhaps what kept me going were the copious pencil scribblings left behind by a previous borrower of my library copy (such a crime would have been unforgivable had I not been so confused about what to look for). Elements that might have seemed irrelevant in a superficial reading took on the importance they deserved: pigeons (“To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin”), columbaria, moths (“I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies”), buttoned gloves, star-shaped patterns…

Sifting through the remnants of his past, like Walter Benjamin’s materialist historian, Austerlitz has to conduct himself like archaeologists excavating the ruins of a forgotten city—has “to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.” The fragments Austerlitz finds, like the ones Benjamin describes, are already gone, or else so decayed as to be hardly decipherable. Unsatisfied with every stroke of the spade, Austerlitz “must … assay [the] spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers.” Dan Jacobson’s vertigo before the chasm of the Kimberly diamond mines, where so many Africans were sacrificed, toward the end of the novel, becomes the metaphor for the “vanished past” of Austerlitz’s family and people (and Jacobson’s own), which “can never be brought up from those depths again.” (Jacobson: “everything about [my grandfather] as an individual that had been hidden from me before I went [to Lithuania] remains hidden still, and always will do so. His secrets are enclosed in time past like the pattern inside an uncut agate stone: not just beyond amendment or erasure, but unknowable too.”) Austerlitz’s ghosts can’t be laid to rest, and he himself becomes a mere shadow, unable to get into the sunlight from the shadow of the Holocaust, made ghostly by Time, grief, and the vanishing of things.