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May 19, 2011

K.D. rated it:

The saddest book that I've read so far.

Imagine that you, at the age of 4, were separated from your parents during the war and you were raised by people who you thought were your real parents. Then towards your midlife, you knew that your biological parents were tortured and killed mercilessly but you did not have any concrete information about them except some vague assumptions? And that there were these scenes from that period that reside in the recesses of your mind but could not More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 28, 2010

John rated it:

Many reviewers have cited the difficulty of the prose in “Austeritz,” but I find this difficult to comprehend. Have they never read Proust? Joyce? Faulkner? Once one has survived these trials by fire, Sebald’s prose is comparatively accessible. Still others have claimed that this is a “Holocaust novel,” and I find this equally perplexing. Certainly, while Austerlitz’s childhood experience of being sent to England via Kindertransport away from his parents forms a locus for what little narra More...

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

May 13, 2009

Tyler rated it:

Using a fractured frame narrative, Sebald turns this book into a resplendent meditation on how qualities triumph over cold facts, and how impressions reshape memory, time, and space. An example will make the author's style clearer. As we follow a man’s journey to recapture the past, watch how Sebald describes a dingy London train station. The speaker, Austerlitz, finds himself ...

... unable to move from the spot, with my face raised to the icy gray light, like moonshine, which came

More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 24, 2011

Maia rated it:

This is a novel to be read slowly. I took my time, stopping to digest the sensations and really consider how I felt—I’m finding, as I did in high school and college (where I read a lot of German lit and studied a lot of German Expressionism in art) that German works have this effect in me. Ironic, really, considering I am now married to a German and living as an expat in Germany, an experience I find mostly baffling and not entirely comfortable!

The story is that of a middle-aged Germ More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jan 12, 2011

Nick rated it:

It's hard to describe how beautiful Sebald's prose is. The sinuous sentences careered effortlessly down the page. Much credit must be given to the translators--I couldn't believe I was reading something that was originally written in German. The juxtaposition of history, architecture, and photography combined with Proustian ruminations on time and existence were transporting and really created those moments of poetic ecstasy that keep people reading Literature with a capital L. My one reservatio More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 01, 2009

Becky rated it:

I finally finished! I am so glad I stuck it out through the first few pages, enough to discover the wonderful rhythmical phrases. One of the few descriptive authors that I can tolerate. I typically dislike too much prose, but somehow Sebald accomplishes this without seeming like a flowery self-righteous creep and it flows and reads naturally. Truly lovely. I am also a sucker for WWII-related themes; the more melancholy the better, and this carefully woven tale did not disappoint. I cannot praise More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 13, 2008

Alison rated it:

A good follow-up to Swann's Way, at least Swann's Way as I read it. This novel subversively and gracefully explores the art and artifice of the memoir form: an unnamed narrator reports on the memoirs of a man named Austerlitz, who has only recently begun to research and discover his own past, which has been obscured from him for decades by traumatic amnesia, and of which virtually no traces of supporting data remain after the Holocaust. How does Austerlitz discover that past? By an obsessive More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 14, 2009

Jayaprakash rated it:

Austerlitz is written in a digressive, somehow old-fashioned voice. By the end, the many digressions seem less peripheral - it's as if the brief overview of fort architecture, the musings on the eyes of nocturnal creatures, the passages about the library in Paris all relate in some way to Austerlitz' doomed attempt to hide from his past, to the character of the evil that scarred his life so badly and the human toll of the holocaust. The structure of the story with its second hand narrative is in More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 06, 2007

David rated it:

it's the autumn. the floating leaves and cold mornings. coffee swirling up over your ceramic cup and up into sad skies. where on your morning commute you feel the weight of architecture. curbs remind you of a hand you once held. and the world becomes full of the people that stepped through your life. on some personal level this book reminds you of the power of memory and to divorce yourself from your own personal history condemns you to a life not lived. there is a photograph of my grandfather w More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Julia rated it:

A história de Jacques Austerlitz é descrita como uma história do holocausto, e foi por causa da invasão alemã à Praga que ele é enviado ao País de Gales e cresce com a sensação de não pertencer a lugar algum, e é entre os sobreviventes de guetos de judeus e comunistas que ele procura seus pais. Mas o holocausto é o pano de fundo, o motivo pelo qual ele quer esquecer seu passado antes de desconfiar do que pode ter vivido, mas também o motivo pelo qual depois quer saber, quer encontrar o rosto da More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 30, 2011

Juanita rated it:

Why do I read books? Why does someone like Sebald, or Erdrich or Morrison or Ondaatje, write books? For what? To what aim? And what would justify calling one book "bad" and another "good" without reference to that purpose of reader or writer?

I did not enjoy Austerlitz. In truth, for perhaps the first half of the book, I found reading it a fruitless task and an unpleasant one. I persisted because of Sebald's standing, especially with a few people whose tastes More...

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Oct 25, 2011

Robert rated it:

Perhaps my frustration with this book stems from the fact that I read it third, after reading the powerful "Emigrants" and the stunning "Rings of Saturn", and then this one, all within a month for a class. It was a terrific class, and a unique experience to be so fully immersed in the writings of such a talented author. But by the time I was reading "Austerlitz", I wanted to shake the narrator and the protagonist (or vice versa) and tell them to pull themselves toge More...

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Oct 13, 2011

Corinne E. rated it:

Austerlitz

It is hard to tell whether Austerlitz is a memoir, a biography, an autobiography, an excursion into a nearly lost world of 19th century European architecture, a philosophical meditation on memory, trauma, and historical disorientation in relation to the Holocaust, or, at last, an historical novel in which any effort to “novelistically historicize” the past is sternly resisted. In brief, Austerlitz is an original novel that repels our usual generic assumptions
In this w More...

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Oct 11, 2011

Corinne rated it:

It is hard to tell whether Austerlitz is a memoir, a biography, an autobiography, an excursion into a nearly lost world of 19th century European architecture, a philosophical meditation on memory, trauma, and historical disorientation in relation to the Holocaust, or, at last, an historical novel in which any effort to “novelistically historicize” the past is sternly resisted. In brief, Austerlitz is an original novel that repels our usual generic assumptions
In this work of post-Holocaust More...

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Oct 08, 2011

Veronica rated it:

Sebald's work is haunting. There are images and passages that will stay with you forever after reading them. It is very difficult to summarize Sebald's books as they cover so many different things in a meandering, seemingly ramdom manner. With Sebald, however, nothing is ever random. This is perhaps more apparent in The Rings of Saturn, which starts and ends, in a way, with Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. The Amazon.com summary will tell you that this is a story of a man named Austerlitz who was put More...

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Sep 27, 2011

Rachel rated it:

This completely original, beautifully written book traces the attempts of Jacques Austerlitz to recover and reclaim his own past, lost to him when he was sent to safety in England by his Czech/French family as a four year-old just prior to the outbreak of WWII. He survives the war as the adoptee of a Welsh couple, physically intact but psychologically and emotionally shattered -- a shattering which takes place in slow motion throughout his life, only picking up speed and violence as he grows ol More...

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Sep 23, 2011

Lara rated it:

I approached this book as if I was about to read to a novel (which is it, in form) but realized soon enough it should be read as a intellectual treatise -- not only of the ravages of war, but also the decay of time and memory, death and the absence of belonging, and how this then molds our very being.
The protagonist is haunted by his absent real childhood, which was replaced by a false one of poor construction. Despite his life-long suspicions of his origins, he buries his instincts of this More...

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Aug 23, 2011

Carl rated it:

When he was barely 5 years old, Jacques Austerlitz was sent by his mother from Prague to England by train in what were known as the special children's transports. His mother, Jewish, had discerned what was likely to happen, and sent him on his way to safety the day before the Germans knocked on her door. He was placed with the Rev. Elias and his wife at a small country parsonage in Wales, a parsonage that was both physically and emotionally cold. When the wife of Rev. Elias became terminally ill More...

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Aug 21, 2011

Thurston rated it:

The parallel memoir, Austerlitz said, approaches the comical at times.
I don't know enough of Sebald's bio, to know if this was to push
himself away from the spotlight, or perhaps another step in capturing
the ongoing alienation of Austerlitz.

The symbolism of buildings, pigeons, moths, I'm not sure I caught.
I could make up something, but nothing flashed in my synapses,
perhaps pigeons and moths are creatures which have somewhat adapted
to urban life/de More...

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Apr 28, 2011

Denis rated it:

This is the first novel - if such a term applies to this complex work - by W.G. Sebald that I have read, and it has been such a transcendent, intensely emotional experience, that I am almost at a loss for words when it comes to write about it. Sebald is an extraordinary writer - that's a known fact. His gift with language and words is stunning: his writing mesmerizes, in the same way Proust's or Nabokov's writing do. His literary imagination leaves me speechless. I am certain that, for a lot of More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Feb 01, 2011

Philippe rated it:

For the first 100 pages or so, I was truly captivated by this book. Sebald's classic prose - as delightfully polished and musical as one could wish (I read the German version) - was a wonderful match for the rarefied, slightly claustrophobic atmosphere of the Belgian and Irish settings in which the story initially unfolds. But once the narration moves to more familiar locales (London, Prague, Paris) and we become more accustomed to the introspective and neurotic mindscape of the protagonist, the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 23, 2009

Justin rated it:

I couldn't do it. I really wanted to finish this book. I finish every book I start, and even if I hate them, I enjoy writing scathing reviews. But as my wife pointed out, life is too short. It's not just the execrable prose style, which I'm sure is intentional and has some theoretical justification. It's not the photos- I quite like the idea of photos in novels. It's not just the idiotic attempts to be highbrow, by referencing Wittgenstein (whom the narrator thinks is a 'dark thinker'!) And it's More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 03, 2009

Robert rated it:

When I told a mate, who is a fine man and whose opinion I respect, that I found Sebald's The Rings of Saturn difficult, he said, 'Read Austerlitz, you cantankerous old git. It's even better than Rings. Austerlitz is his Meisterwerk.' So I paid good money and started to read.

I reached page 218 before giving up. (I joked to my mate that this was halfway through the first paragraph but actually there may have been a few paragraph breaks up to this point.) Here is the sentence that did i More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

Andrew added it

This was the last of Sebald’s four novel/nonfiction/who knows books that I hadn’t read. All of the familiar Sebald themes were present: the fluid nature of memory, Holocaust, architecture, anxiety, disenchantment, the dislocation of “home,” etc. etc. etc. If you are fascinated by these things and don’t especially care about plot, you will like Sebald.

I think these things are fascinating—so fascinating that I typically write about them myself. In fact, Sebald has written everything th More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 21, 2011

MJ rated it:

More meandering and glorious Sebaldian prose, with sentences callipered from 18thC German texts and respooled into post-war Wales, France and Germany, with one man’s attempt to comprehend the horrors of the Theresienstadt workcamp and—obliquely—the Holocaust. This novel is a longer, more distancing work than The Emigrants or Vertigo, both chopped into four chapters and separate narrative threads.

The framing device here is unusual, with the narrator (Sebald?) quoting long screeds of More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2010

Taka rated it:

I don't get it--

This book came highly recommended to me by two of my good friends and I only had the highest expectations for it. As I browsed through the book - as I do everytime before I plunge into any book - I saw the photographs, the 1.5-line-spacing, and the lack of any discernible paragraph.

Okay, I said to myself, this must be quite an experience.

And so I began the days of self-torture.

The first one hundred, maybe one hundred fifty, pages is More...

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Oct 15, 2010

Jimmy rated it:

At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life. p.212

A book about a man, Austerlitz, who is pictured on the cover as a boy looking very much like The Little Prince, trying to find his way back to his planet. Yes, it is about the holocaust, but it is not a futile exercise in despair. The writing is too good to allow that easy of a route. Instead, the hypnotic prose sustains us in a state of meditation. I've never read any other author who c More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 26, 2011

Michael rated it:

I just finished re-reading this (my six-year-old daughter has become somewhat obsessed by Fred Astaire, which, in a bit of free-association, made me think of this novel, and so I searched our overflowing bookshelves, and happily found it, waiting there quietly). Reading 'Austerlitz' now was every bit as impressive an experience as it was for me back in 2002.

Though not without some very subtle shades of humor, this is a profoundly melancholy book. Sebald developed a prose style that More...

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Oct 10, 2011

Stewart rated it:

"Austerlitz," a 2001 book by by W.G. Sebald, is not about the 1805 battle in Moravia in which Napoleon’s French army decisively defeated Austrian and Russian forces. It is rather a German-language novel (translated by Anthea Bell) about Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who tries to find out the secrets of his childhood. Austerlitz tells his story of discovery to the first-person narrator during encounters throughout Europe after World War II.
Austerlitz was sent in More...

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Nov 29, 2010

Don rated it:

Stunning book. Austerlitz, a man without memory or personal awareness wanders across rural North Wales and the cityscapes of London, Flanders, Paris and Prague and recovers a knowledge of history and his own family's entanglements with its tragedies.

A way of looking at the world which Sebald introduced to us in Vertigo-Emmigrants-Saturn is used here in epic fashion. To gaze on a building is to see time dissolve as its history is recounted to make sense of the present it occupies. More...

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