What I Am Reading: "Austerlitz" by W.G. Sebald

I had been waiting to read this weird book since much earlier in the pandemic, but the inner workings of the library system didn't yield it until now (ironic, since a recalcitrant and dilatory library system is one of the vignettes related in the book). As such, I can't remember precisely how it came to my attention.

The novel is a dreamy, meandering, digressive story told to the narrator by the protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, throughout a series of meetings spanning several decades and several old European cities. Austerlitz comes to the narrator’s attention as an itinerant student of architecture, studying the similarities of buildings meant to exert or fortify power, such as train stations, asylums, castles, or prisons. Many buildings of this nature are visited throughout the story, as Austerlitz is confronted with the weight of the built environment at every turn.

After a gap of several years, the narrator re-connects with Austerlitz, who proceeds to tell his life story. First, he starts with his British childhood, as he was the adopted child of a Welsh preacher and his wife, and his matriculation through the usual dismal British boarding school. However, after a breakdown and depressive episode, Austerlitz realizes his deep-seeded psychological need to seek out his origins, which he believes lie in a journey as a Jewish refugee child to Wales from the heart of threatened Central Europe just before the Nazi conquest.

Austerlitz recreates this journey, the sights of which correspond to memories and ephemeral images that he has always seen in dreams or otherwise had come to mind. With the advantage of his unique last name, he is able to track down the records of his mother in Prague, and her journey with other Jews to the ghetto of Terezin, sited in an old Austrian star fortress (an inevitably obsolete fortification, as he explains early in the book). At the end of the story, he is off again to Terezin to seek out his mother's fate in their archives; and has also, after a frustrated effort in Paris, found the trail of his father, who was sent to an internment camp in the Pyrenees.

Austerlitz has his own theories about the movement of time, and when he visits some decrepit location, unchanged other than through decay, he thinks that it is a spot where time moves more slowly. He also says that, just as we are always racing off to keep an appointment with the future, perhaps we are intended to keep one with the past as well, perhaps why he had a literally physiological need to seek out his origins. This approach to time is shown the structure of the story, as a kind of chronological loop: as Austerlitz moves forward in life, his research takes him back further into his past, and the past of his (nuclear) family. It is more complicated than just a loop though, as Austerlitz is relating the story in the second person in several different sittings, some separated by a gap of years. Thus, it is a story about the overall story that Austerlitz told the narrator, relating his own story and the story of his efforts to learn the stories of his parents.

The book is both dreamlike and gloomy, though that is not to say that it is nightmarish. We don’t learn of the deaths of Austerlitz’s parents, though it is an obvious eventuality throughout. Along the way we see old Europe through the smoky filter of cryptic photographs, reminisces, and retold histories of peoples long dead. The land and the buildings remain, even as people pass through them with scarcely a trace. This is a fact brought into sharp relief by the nightmares of the Holocaust, where concentration camps occupy the same land that had seen castles and Napoleonic fortresses and would see concrete apartment blocks and chemical factories. As any book about the Holocaust must, Austerlitz has a strong sense of the weight of history and memory, especially as seen through the lens of architecture. Austerlitz’s decision to open his eyes and grapple with it (instead of ending his concept of history with the dawn of the 20th century) is essential to his humanity.