Austerlitz (novel)
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| Austerlitz | |
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| Author(s) | W. G. Sebald |
| Translator | Anthea Bell |
| Cover artist | Andy Carpenter |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Genre(s) | Historical novel |
| Publisher | C. Hanser |
| Publication date | 6 November 2001 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 416 |
| ISBN | 3446199861 |
| OCLC Number | 46380518 |
Austerlitz is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald's final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
[edit] Plot
Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his life history. He arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from a Czechoslovakia threatened by Hitler's Nazis. He was adopted by an elderly Welsh Calvinist preacher and his sickly wife, and spent his childhood in Mid Wales before attending a minor public school. His foster parents died, and Austerlitz learned something of his background. After school he attended university and became an academic who is drawn to, and began his research in, the study of European architecture. After a nervous breakdown, Austerlitz visited Prague where he met a close friend of his lost parents. The elderly lady tells him the fate of his mother, an actress and opera singer who was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. From Prague, Austerlitz traveled to Theriesenstadt. Here we learn about the disappearance of European Jewry during the Holocaust.
The novel shifts to contemporary Paris as Austerlitz seeks out any remaining evidence about the fate of his father. Sebald explores the ways in which collections of records, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France or National Library of France, entomb memories. During the novel we have been taken on a guided tour of a lost European civilization: a world of fortresses, railway stations, concentration camps and libraries.
[edit] Style
Formally, the novel is notable because of its lack of paragraphing, a digressive style, the blending of fact and fiction, very long and complex sentences (one sentence is about 9 pages long) as well as the inclusion of a set of mysterious and evocative photographs, scattered throughout the book, which enhance the melancholy message of the text. Many of these features characterize Sebald's other works of fiction, including The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo.
[edit] Editions
- Austerlitz. München: C. Hanser, 2001.
- Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2001.
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