Dark forests, abandoned mines, drowned villages, emptied towns, ruined citadels, cold mists, and fog, so much fog. Anglo-German author W.G Sebald's Austerlitz is a story told like few others of the past century. But it is also a portentous, Proustian dream. A book where clouded memories are pierced by a present. A book in which characters struggle with a heavy melancholy and drift in and out of their own pasts. In these pages, the past is not a linear shot of one thing after another. Time, spiraling and vertiginous, wraps up the past and presses it against the constricted present. As one passage describes linear reality which, "does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption...and evolves in no one direction." In Austerlitz, entering a room or touching an old object can reveal long suppressed memories or leave a character cold and mute. Even the title, a village and battle site, is also a character, a fiction, and a mode of telling a truth. In the book, everything is "lapsing into oblivion" as darkly beautiful imagery slowly ushers us through a somber, eerie, and mesmerizing tale.
According to Sebald, the Germans who came of age in the post World War II era experienced a silence, a void stories should have filled. In that ____ is where his characters wander, haunted by specters they don't know and a clouded past they should and do fear. Tony Judt pointed out in his brilliant book Postwar the speed and vibrancy of Europe's economic reconstruction after the war's end. Flooded with American dollars and a building boom a destroyed Europe was rebuilt in little more than a decade. Just ten years after camps were emptied and the streets were cleared of air raid rubble, a horrible past was cleaned up but unlike the debris, it was not cleared away. Like the rings of saturn--another title of Sebald's, the image of a crushed moon caught in an eternal orbit is a haunting metaphor for the inability to escape the past. The German film "Wings of Desire," captures the weight of the past quite beautifully. Bruno Ganz's angel character wanders through Berlin, past paved-over sites, debris, and uninterpreted objects that stand as ghostly markers of a terrifying history.
As for the plot: Austerlitz, an orphan raised in a Calvinist home in Wales, grows up to be a scholar of architecture--a wild-haired genius who is undependable and always wearing a rucksack. The story we read is told as a narrative to an academic friend as a remembrance of things past. As his tale of self-discovery unfolds, Austerlitz travels to Bohemia and then Germany--both new and old to him--while England, too, is "alien and incomprehensible." At each step Austerlitz must confront and negotiate with his past. He must, as one character theorizes about history, stare at the images of the past while the truth lies elsewhere "undiscovered." Sebald's story dips into the camps and the ghettos but does not linger long, because this is not a historical novel as much as it is a book about grappling with horror and its terrifying echoes. But never has a narrative so wonderfully caught the Atlas-like weight of the past as this book. The recurring images and the wall-to wall prose offer thrilling flashes of insight into the task of remembering.
There are also beautiful nods to Virginia Woolf's "Death of a Moth," Faulkner, Bernhardt, and nineteenth century German greats like Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller. The prose has the bleak beauty of Coetzee, but also a tenderness and richness that the South African Nobel laureate rarely manages. Sebald also raises heavy questions for a world after Auschwitz: What have we learned? What do we choose not to know? How can we endure the echoes of such a past? 