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A review by buddhafish
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
5.0
175th book of 2020.
I exist only because my German grandmother and her brother were two of 35 children brought to England at the end of the Second World War on the Kindertransport by an English Red Cross Charity worker named Edith Snellgrove. For whatever reason, she fell in love with my grandmother and my great-uncle, and, though not formally, adopted them. My grandmother is still alive today, whom I see twice a week, though she suffers from dementia and schizophrenia and has no command of the German language anymore. My brother and I slightly resent the fact we were never taught German, or indeed any other language, as children. Edith Snellgrove spoke 9 languages fluently and though she taught my grandmother bits of French and Russian, she was never invested enough to learn properly. In fact, when I was a child, my grandmother went once a week to German classes, to try and hold onto her native language that was left in Germany when she was brought to a foreign country by, essentially, a stranger, and had to learn English. Her father, Friedhelm Jung, died in 1944 in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; he was stationed in Crimea as soon as the War broke out—he was already in prison in 1939, for refusing to give money to the Hitler Church. With me now, in my home, I have a box filled with photographs and even Friedhelm’s letters from Crimea that he sent to his wife, detailing, where he could, what it was like and how he was. These letters have mostly been translated by an old German teacher my grandmother met at a Quaker Meeting House. I could go on, but all this I hope to one day write into a novel, and this isn’t about my grandmother, but about Austerlitz.
Jacques Austerlitz is without a past. Of course, I don’t mean this literally. We all have pasts. One of my old professors used to talk about people, like good characters in novels, being like asteroids or stars in the sky, scorching traces behind them, burning history into space and time. Austerlitz has a trace behind him, but he recognises it is not a trace he associates with himself. In the same way, I look at the trace my grandmother has left behind her here in England, and I wonder if once she looked back and thought how unfamiliar her own life felt to her. That is what Austerlitz’s life seems to him. As I read the novel, I felt his character’s emptiness and alienation, the same feelings that arose out of Sebald’s other, brilliant, novel The Emigrants. His first novel, Vertigo, does not lack those feelings, though they are more rooted by the sense of, well, vertigo. And we do not have to look far to see the feelings of alienation, time and memory in The Rings of Saturn either. The scope in the other novels, however, are wider: there are multiple characters, multiple stories, fragments, sometimes almost fractal… But in Austerlitz, our vision is concentrated on this boy who was sent on the Kindertransport in 1939 by his parents to escape the persecution of the Jews, heading for his new Welsh parents. By the time our narrator meets Austerlitz, he meets a man who feels he has left the wrong trace behind him in the sky. As he says himself at one point in the novel, We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. Thus begins Austerlitz’s narrative, his quest; and really, it is the oldest quest we know, a quest for home.
Sebald’s choice of structure differs from what we are used to. Austerlitz’s narrative comprises most of the book; there are no speech marks, there are no conversations, per se, and the narrator ‘says’ nothing.. Though the narrator does have internal thoughts. Here is a beautiful observation he has on Austerlitz: I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. Instead, Austerlitz’s monologue is a reel, paragraphs running for thirty or forty pages at a time, sometimes sentences running for seven pages at a time, as Austerlitz reports his long, rambling story in Sebald’s famous, ethereal style. And, like with Sebald’s other novels, it is filled with photographs, randomly occurring, sometimes relating to the text and sometimes not. He is a grown man, describing his quest for his identity and his history, and most importantly, and concretely, his real parents. So, as with Sebald’s other novels, Austerlitz is about history, time, memory, self and heritage; he is a voice of the post-war world, a world that Sebald understood, would never be the same for literature. As the New York Times said, with Primo Levi, Sebald is the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”. And Susan Sontag said,
“Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”
As I said in my first pre-review, I believe Sebald to be one of the most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century. It saddens me greatly that he only managed to write four novels before his death at the age of 57, after suffering a brain aneurysm whilst driving; he died before his car swerved out of control and collided with an oncoming lorry, severely injuring his daughter, though thankfully she survived the crash. There is a brilliant interview that took place, if I remember rightly, just over a week before his death, with Michael Silverblatt which I highly recommend. In fact, Silverblatt is perhaps one of the best interviewers out there for writers and has many fantastic ones, especially his ones with David Foster Wallace.
Sebald—Photo from the New Yorker
I have come to the end of Sebald’s oeuvre then. Next year I plan to reread The Rings of Saturn, and then I’ll probably reread Vertigo and The Emigrants too. Then, before I know it, it’ll be time to return to Austerlitz’s narrative, which will just as moving and important as it was now, and in 20 years, 40 years, I believe it will stand the same. I think about Austerlitz when I take books from my grandmother's bookcase, old editions of Goethe and Hesse, written in German, a language she no longer understands. Her own language, in a way, lost. And I realise that where we come from, who we are, what defines us, how we create ourselves from our pasts, and what our pasts do to create us: these are things that never fade.
I exist only because my German grandmother and her brother were two of 35 children brought to England at the end of the Second World War on the Kindertransport by an English Red Cross Charity worker named Edith Snellgrove. For whatever reason, she fell in love with my grandmother and my great-uncle, and, though not formally, adopted them. My grandmother is still alive today, whom I see twice a week, though she suffers from dementia and schizophrenia and has no command of the German language anymore. My brother and I slightly resent the fact we were never taught German, or indeed any other language, as children. Edith Snellgrove spoke 9 languages fluently and though she taught my grandmother bits of French and Russian, she was never invested enough to learn properly. In fact, when I was a child, my grandmother went once a week to German classes, to try and hold onto her native language that was left in Germany when she was brought to a foreign country by, essentially, a stranger, and had to learn English. Her father, Friedhelm Jung, died in 1944 in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; he was stationed in Crimea as soon as the War broke out—he was already in prison in 1939, for refusing to give money to the Hitler Church. With me now, in my home, I have a box filled with photographs and even Friedhelm’s letters from Crimea that he sent to his wife, detailing, where he could, what it was like and how he was. These letters have mostly been translated by an old German teacher my grandmother met at a Quaker Meeting House. I could go on, but all this I hope to one day write into a novel, and this isn’t about my grandmother, but about Austerlitz.
Jacques Austerlitz is without a past. Of course, I don’t mean this literally. We all have pasts. One of my old professors used to talk about people, like good characters in novels, being like asteroids or stars in the sky, scorching traces behind them, burning history into space and time. Austerlitz has a trace behind him, but he recognises it is not a trace he associates with himself. In the same way, I look at the trace my grandmother has left behind her here in England, and I wonder if once she looked back and thought how unfamiliar her own life felt to her. That is what Austerlitz’s life seems to him. As I read the novel, I felt his character’s emptiness and alienation, the same feelings that arose out of Sebald’s other, brilliant, novel The Emigrants. His first novel, Vertigo, does not lack those feelings, though they are more rooted by the sense of, well, vertigo. And we do not have to look far to see the feelings of alienation, time and memory in The Rings of Saturn either. The scope in the other novels, however, are wider: there are multiple characters, multiple stories, fragments, sometimes almost fractal… But in Austerlitz, our vision is concentrated on this boy who was sent on the Kindertransport in 1939 by his parents to escape the persecution of the Jews, heading for his new Welsh parents. By the time our narrator meets Austerlitz, he meets a man who feels he has left the wrong trace behind him in the sky. As he says himself at one point in the novel, We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. Thus begins Austerlitz’s narrative, his quest; and really, it is the oldest quest we know, a quest for home.
Sebald’s choice of structure differs from what we are used to. Austerlitz’s narrative comprises most of the book; there are no speech marks, there are no conversations, per se, and the narrator ‘says’ nothing.. Though the narrator does have internal thoughts. Here is a beautiful observation he has on Austerlitz: I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. Instead, Austerlitz’s monologue is a reel, paragraphs running for thirty or forty pages at a time, sometimes sentences running for seven pages at a time, as Austerlitz reports his long, rambling story in Sebald’s famous, ethereal style. And, like with Sebald’s other novels, it is filled with photographs, randomly occurring, sometimes relating to the text and sometimes not. He is a grown man, describing his quest for his identity and his history, and most importantly, and concretely, his real parents. So, as with Sebald’s other novels, Austerlitz is about history, time, memory, self and heritage; he is a voice of the post-war world, a world that Sebald understood, would never be the same for literature. As the New York Times said, with Primo Levi, Sebald is the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”. And Susan Sontag said,
“Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”
As I said in my first pre-review, I believe Sebald to be one of the most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century. It saddens me greatly that he only managed to write four novels before his death at the age of 57, after suffering a brain aneurysm whilst driving; he died before his car swerved out of control and collided with an oncoming lorry, severely injuring his daughter, though thankfully she survived the crash. There is a brilliant interview that took place, if I remember rightly, just over a week before his death, with Michael Silverblatt which I highly recommend. In fact, Silverblatt is perhaps one of the best interviewers out there for writers and has many fantastic ones, especially his ones with David Foster Wallace.
Sebald—Photo from the New Yorker
I have come to the end of Sebald’s oeuvre then. Next year I plan to reread The Rings of Saturn, and then I’ll probably reread Vertigo and The Emigrants too. Then, before I know it, it’ll be time to return to Austerlitz’s narrative, which will just as moving and important as it was now, and in 20 years, 40 years, I believe it will stand the same. I think about Austerlitz when I take books from my grandmother's bookcase, old editions of Goethe and Hesse, written in German, a language she no longer understands. Her own language, in a way, lost. And I realise that where we come from, who we are, what defines us, how we create ourselves from our pasts, and what our pasts do to create us: these are things that never fade.