Having quietly lived a life that was given to him, Austerlitz in retirement sets out to reclaim his lost self. The process is a slow and painstaking investigation which, while personal, brilliantly evokes a Europe that is both gracious and terrifying. Yet again, the inspired and inspiring German writer, W.G. Sebald, author of The Rings of Saturn, creates a subtle aura of quiet, disciplined intensity in the pursuit of the past. This fourth meditative, photomontage-like fiction is magnificent; atmospheric, elusive and allusive, as well as beautiful, romantic and strange as everything he has to date written.
It is also somewhat different, more narratively cohesive, though as aware of the random and life's bizarre connections as ever. The now familiar Sebald narrator, embarking on relentless intellectual quests of exploration, observation and re-discovery, this time becomes a spellbound witness. Still a restless seeker of truths, he now also assumes the role of listener, as the singular character he meets on one of his many trips to Belgium apparently selects him, though only after long years, as his confidant.
The elegant narrative that unfolds is mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. As ever with Sebald, time, the past, memory and the dead determine the action.
Austerlitz had been raised by Calvinist Methodists in Wales. He was given their name, and all that happened to him before his arrival there at the age of five was erased from his mind. The intention was not sinister, it was survival, devised to assist his acceptance of a new identity. As a schoolboy, he is eventually informed of his real name. The two men, the German narrator and the once displaced child from wartime Europe, begin a close if distant relationship that develops in intense bursts and then falters into silence only to be revived.
Working as an architectural historian, Austerlitz is based in London. His specialist interest is the architectural style of the capitalist era. He is drawn to order and, as the narrator recalls, "the tendency towards monumentalism evident in lawcourts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwellings built to rectangular grid patterns for the labour force".
Early in the novel, the narrator reports his friend as having "quite often found himself in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the Parisian railway stations, which, he said, he regarded as places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune".
However remote Austerlitz appears to be to the narrator, and in the first phase of their friendship the only personal fact he discloses is an obsession with railway stations, this mysterious loner immediately emerges as a person of immense sensitivity marked by a regret he does not understand. "As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all."
For the narrator, his enigmatic acquaintance is many things. On seeing him again, in a crowd, after a long interval of almost 20 years, the narrator is overcome "for a considerable time by my amazement at the unexpected return of Austerlitz". While observing his long absent friend, the narrator is struck by his resemblance to "the disconsolate philosopher" Ludwig Wittgenstein "and the horror-stricken expressions on both their faces". Both men always carried rucksacks. It is a simple image, but one that, as the story of Austerlitz's experiences evolves, acquires symbolic resonance.
The narrative is balanced between two haunting stories, firstly that of the bleak world inhabited by his foster parents: Elias, a strict churchman, and his despairing English wife. Their history is recalled with exact detail by Austerlitz, who speaks with the certainty of one who lived part of their lives with them. Then there is the other story, that of his natural parents, the ghosts he can't remember, yet in age attempts to rediscover. The world of his cautious father and his lovely, vibrant mother, Agβta, an opera singer, is lovingly pieced together.
As an older man, bewildered and lost, he returns to Prague and finds Vera, a survivor from his lost past. It is she who fills in some of the many missing pieces. Slowly, the story surfaces like the details in a creased old photograph.
In the study of one such picture, that of Austerlitz as a small boy in fancy dress, he is faced with an image from his own past that try as he might he can not recall. "I could not recollect myself in the part. I did recognise the unusual hairline running at a slant over the forehead, but otherwise all memory was extinguished in me by an overwhelming sense of the long years that had passed . . . "
The tension between the living and the dead, the uneasy juxtaposition existing between these states, is partly explained as Austerlitz realises, "the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision". Throughout this slow-moving, thoughtful book, devastating moments occur; a visit to deserted Terez∞n, the recreation of the ghetto where Austerlitz's mother was despatched, his desperate attempts to see her face in an old film, the passage where he recalls tracking his father through Paris, imagining his presence and taking furtive glances into "quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades". Once, during a visit to Austerlitz's London home, the narrator discovers a collection of moths, each entombed in their perfection, in a tiny jar. Always there is the sense of wonder at death in life, and life in death.
Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald. Austerlitz, as elegy and testament, can only be described as a profound, alluring masterwork of singular genius.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
An extract from Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald, appears in Weekend 13
