Austerlitz by W.G Sebald

 As I may have mentioned in my post on The Emigrants, after rereading that masterpiece I was so certain that I was in the presence of genius that I stopped reading Sebald. I acquired all his books, but decided to hold the pleasure those books would give, the wonder, the awe, in reserve. I am entering that pleasure, that wonder, that awe now, with Austerlitz.

Sebald's concerns in Austerlitz, which is no less stunning than The Emigrants, are the same: how survivors make their way through the post-Holocaust world. A Sebald-like narrator hears, over many years, the account of one Jacques Austerlitz, a child who was brought to Wales as part of the Kindertransport. Austerlitz has only the sketchiest of memories of how he got to Wales; he does not learn his real name until he is sixteen.

Later, he attempts to find out what became of his parents, the mother who remained in Czechoslovakia and the father who had made it to France. It is this search that he tells the narrator about, and in Sebald's calm, quiet, melancholic prose, we join him in his search. The search is mesmerizing. James Wood, writing in the LRB, points out that:  

what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader, is involved in a journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberate frustration of detection, the perpetuation of an enigma.

Wood also points out that when we learn that Austerlitz's mother was "sent East," we can only assume that she was sent to Auschwitz.  We realize that the novel's title has evoked that hell, that we may even have mistaken the novel's title at some point for its name.

Wood's piece is brilliant on this novel and on Sebald in general. Read it here.