Review: Austerlitz
Redaktioneller Bericht - Kirkus ReviewsAnother haunting mixture of history, memoir, and photo album from the author of The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Vertigo (2000). Sebald's fourth novel, like its predecessors, is a melancholy meditation on the dark side of human history. The unnamed narrator recounts the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, a polymath whose erudition, like the author's, runs the gamut from his chosen field of architectural history to his avocation of zoology. Meeting by chance in the Antwerp railroad station, Austerlitz and the narrator fall easily into a learned conversation about the building itself that gradually leads to a discussion of the history and mysteries of Europe's fortified cities. A friendship of sorts develops and the two meet from time to time, at first apparently without planning, to continue their chat as if no time had elapsed in between. Gradually, Austerlitz begins to reveal his personal history. In 1939, at the age of five, he was adopted and raised by an austere Welsh cleric and his equally forbidding wife. He knows nothing of his past until he is encouraged to explore history by an inspirational teacher. Eventually, Austerlitz discovers that he is a child of a Jewish couple who vanished in the Holocaust after sending him to England to escape—no surprise to those who are familiar with Sebald's earlier work. Austerlitz recounts his story in a low-key, slow-moving, but utterly engrossing prose style, with almost no paragraph or chapter breaks, interrupted only by a series of eerie photographs of landscapes, architectural features, and hazily glimpsed faces. The tale is cunningly constructed around internal echoes, phrases repeated many pages apart, whose larger significance can be grasped only on repetition, and a complex, multilayered set of thematic correspondences that cannot be unraveled on a single reading. Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Keith - GoodreadsBefore Austerlitz I was only dimly aware of WG Sebald's literary reputation. By this I mean that I knew it was serious and well-established. Then in late 2011 I read James Wood's gloss in the London ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Anthony Michael - GoodreadsTo keep this review spoiler-free, I decided to take a cue from the book's titular character, who has a flair for “marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Yael Conti - GoodreadsUnlike other Holocaust books I have read in the past, such as If This Is a Man by Primo Levy, Austerlitz by WG Sebald does not deal with the horrors of the ghettos and concentration camps through the ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Cheryl - GoodreadsWinfried Georg Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, a Roman Catholic Alpine Village in Germany in 1944. He died in 2001 after suffering an aneurysm while driving with his daughter, Anna who survived ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Charlotte - GoodreadsA serious book. It creeps under your skin like damp creeps into a house. Reading it is like absorbing a sensation rather than a story and by the end you feel weighed down by the pressure that Sebald ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Janice - GoodreadsBrilliant, devastating. We (in the "I" of a sort of faceless narrator) meet Jacques Austerlitz in a train station - in the Salle des pas perdus, the hall of lost footsteps. Austerlitz is an ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Tommy - GoodreadsI am reading this book again. I paired this book up with To the Lighthouse three years ago, trying to get a conversation going between these two texts, and I was able to find some tenuous strands of ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - Risi Adler - GoodreadsAusterlitz by WG. Sebald is a beautifully written story of the search for one's identity. We first meet Austerlitz with the narrator in Belgium in 1967. Their friendship stretches across decades and ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Review: Austerlitz
Nutzerbericht - GoodreadsFrom BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3: WG Sebald's masterpiece novel about remembering the Holocaust, in a new dramatisation for radio by Michael Butt. The narrator meets a quiet stranger in the Antwerp ...
