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 dialogue from a conversation with Jacques Austerlitz, whose story comprises the novel. Within this frame, a sub-frame, when Austerlitz quotes from Vera, an old lady who helps him uncover his secret childhood. Both these devices are distracting—for the narrator to recall book-length dollops of conversation the interviews would need to be transcribed, and no mention is made of this occurring. Likewise, the long dreamy sentences are forever punctuated with ‘ . . . said Austerlitz’ to remind us we’re within a frame.

This aside, Austerlitz is a dour meditation on unimaginable horrors, handled with exquisite tenderness and power. Occasionally dull, written as one continuous block with no paragraph breaks, punctuated with miserable and fascinating photographs, and less humour than usual.

Listen to Sebald discuss this book in this final interview, recorded eight days before his death in a car crash.