The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. Trans. Anthea Bell
Philip Landon

W. G. Sebald. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. Random House, 2001. 300 pp. $24.95.

The fourth novel by the German expatriate author W. G. Sebald records the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, an eccentric architectural historian born in Prague and raised by foster parents in Wales. Battling the alienation that has wrecked his life, Austerlitz eventually reclaims his origins from the darkness of the Holocaust, aspiring to "a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life." Sebald’s narrator, driven by a similar impulse, shudders to think "how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on." Sebald employs an old-fashioned, scholarly manner to entirely fresh ends, fusing learning and sensitivity into a kind of neurotic sublime. He stares into the abyss, yet engages in an act of affirmation: of the individual against the mass, of the detail against our habitual inattention, of recollection against oblivion. The repressed memories of Jacques Austerlitz serve to indict the entire postwar age of denial through forgetting. Identity is fragile, we are reminded, and the individual is forever at the mercy of fanatical ideologies, whether religious, capitalist, or totalitarian. Sebald’s new translator, Anthea Bell, proves a worthy successor to Michael Hulse: the language is exquisite. But how to evoke the reach and the immense appeal of Sebald’s vision, with its uncanny anecdotes, its quirkiness, and its compassion? His humanist stance is qualified by an annihilating sense of historical contingency, yet he never succumbs to cynicism. The sheer quality of the writing seems a statement of value. Austerlitz shines like a light. [Philip Landon]