‘Austerlitz’: Catching a Dream with WG Sebald
Reflections on Identity and Belonging in a new class of fiction
A few years ago I read the much celebrated work by Markus Zusak The Book Thief and have been turning over the book in my head once in a while. The young adult tone of the book on a subject like the Jewish extermination in World War II stuck me as odd. It is not the juxtaposition of humorous writing style with grim subjects that was jarring for me, as I love the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Haller. Something about the diction, narrative choices and characters seemed off to me. The subject of Holocaust never seemed personal enough for me for the author. It felt as if it was merely a historical vehicle for the author to advance his narrative and could easily have been replaced by another tragedy of similar magnitude. But I understand I am in a minority here and the book obviously connected with a lot of readers and I might have missed what the author was really meaning to say.
So when I finished Austerlitz by WG Sebald on a fourth attempt, the void created by Zusak’s book in my mind seemed to have been filled. This is a story about a man named Jacques Austerlitz who is sent to live with foster parents at the age of five with no clue of what happened to his original family. As Austerlitz grows up, he purposely avoids delving into any clues about his origins. He is an architectural historian and his conversations with the book’s narrator (a proxy for Sebald himself) involve pages after pages of discussions on arcane topics like the history of fortification in Europe. This is one of the difficult aspects of the book where the reader can be put off by this seemingly endless ramble on buildings that seem to do nothing to advance the plot.
Haunting Visions
When a sudden deja-vu like moment of him being picked up at a station by his foster parents becomes a recurring nightmare, a now much older Austerlitz is forced to confront his beginnings. It is then we find out about him being an escapee from the Jewish round up by the Nazis in Prague. His parents sent him over to Britain in kindertransport (a rescue effort for children before the outbreak of war) and he had been adopted by a Welsh couple thereafter. Austerlitz tracks down a close friend of his parents, Vera in Prague who then narrates the most heartbreaking portions of the novel: the Jewish round up. Agata, the ill fated mother’s story is harrowing in the sense of dread that it encompasses. The gradual escalation of German directives in their efforts to ghettoise Jews of Prague is described by Vera as:
Everything was caught in a vortex whirling downwards at ever-increasing speed.
This account which did not last even one fifth of the entire book manages to convey dread and melancholy that far surpasses what Zusak was trying to in the entire book when he made bold faced proclamations every few pages about person x will die in y days. Again, apologies for throwing shade at Zusak to prop up my own preference.
Meditation in Architecture
What makes Sebald stand out is his almost academically dry prose that embeds the tragedy of the life of Austerlitz. But what these seemingly irrelevant details surrounding the main story do is establish a sense of place and time like very few can do. This sense is crucial in being able to empathise with the main character who feels lost in time and space. Sebald adds an extra dimension to his writing by adding photographs that capture elements of the story being described: Austerlitz as a boy in a football team, an antique store that he visits and a photograph of him as a boy at Vera’s. All these details add a layer of authenticity to the story but the twist is that none of these photos have anything to do with the story! Sebald, being a collector of old things thought to include these photographs in a fictional narrative, as he understood the power of still photographs. I was immediately reminded of Mark Z. Danielewski’s brilliant House of Leaves where the entire book is filled up with fictitious footnotes and references, giving the book a research paper feel. In the same vein, while I certainly do not possess the literary genius of Sebald, I can be cheeky enough to pull a random stock photograph from the internet. add it the top of this article and caption it as WG Sebald’s family. 😀
Man’s search for meaning
Austerlitz’s discovery of his past provides no convenient catharsis and he becomes even more restless trying to track down his lost father in Paris. He feels as if the boy in the photograph is a shadow that follows him throughout life, one that he knows nothing about. All this is achieved in Sebald’s writing without a hint of trite sentimentality, something that is preserved very well even in translation (Thank you Anthea Bell). His search for his father does not give any definitive answers, although Sebald is a master of withholding key details which are revealed in a matter of fact manner. The most telling example of this is when he mentions his mother and his father were “sent east”. Someone with a keen eye for details could figure out that this place east, is the infamous concentration camp which is a homonym for the main character’s name: Auschwitz.
The mesmeric and haunting tale spun by WG Sebald is a unique piece of fiction that is part history, part memoir and part travelogue that should be read by more people. While I am guilty of using Zusak’s The Book Thief as a foil to highlight the strength of this book, it needs no such crutch and is worthy of serious reading by anyone with any interest. I’ll end with the most tantalising quotes from the book.
Our mightiest projects … most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.
The dead are outside time … and they are not the only ones.
The pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us.
We … have appointments to keep in the past.
