Praise for
W. G. SEBALD AND
“With untraceable swiftness and assurance, W. G. Sebald’s writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circumstances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus, the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that makes his books, one by one, indispensable. He evokes at once the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the inconsolable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment and its ground of memory. Each book seems to be something that surely was impossible, and each (upon every re-reading) is unique and astonishing.”
—W. S. MERWIN
“With W. G. Sebald’s haunting new book,
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI,
“Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art.”
“Sebald is the Joyce of the twenty-first century. His tale of one man’s odyssey through the dark ages of European history, which synthesizes a canon of Continental thought and literature, is one of the most moving and true fictions on the postwar world.”
“W. G. Sebald is a monster—a gorgeous and unwaveringly assured writer, a bold formal innovator, and a man always plunging into the core of identity, singular and national. In
—DAVE EGGERS
“One emerges from a Sebald novel shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed.”
—ANITA BROOKNER
“A remarkable writer—a sort of Teutonic Borges domiciled in England.”
—SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
“One of the most original new voices to have come out of Europe in recent years.”
—PAUL AUSTER
“If you thought literary modernism was dead, guess again. The spirit of such masters as Kafka and Borges lives on in the novels of W. G. Sebald. For Mr. Sebald, not only do ‘big questions’ still exist, but so do the desire and the will to answer them.”
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Contents
Introduction
First Page
INTRODUCTION
JAMES WOOD
In the summer of 1967, a man who remains unnamed but who resembles the author W. G. Sebald, is visiting Belgium. At the Centraal Station in Antwerp, he sees a fellow traveler, with fair, curiously wavy hair, who is wearing heavy walking boots, workman’s trousers made of blue calico, and a well-made but antiquated jacket. He is intently studying the room and taking notes. This is Jacques Austerlitz. The two men fall into conversation, have dinner at the station restaurant, and continue to talk into the night. Austerlitz is a voluble scholar—he explains, to the book’s narrator, about the slightly grotesque display of colonial confidence represented by Antwerp’s Centraal Station, and talks generally about the history of fortification. It is often our mightiest projects, he suggests, that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.
Austerlitz and the Sebald-like narrator meet again—a few months later, in Brussels; then, later still, on the promenade at Zeebrugge. It emerges that Jacques Austerlitz is a lecturer at an institute of art history in London, and that his scholarship is unconventional. He is obsessed with monumental public buildings, like law courts and prisons, railway stations and lunatic asylums, and his investigations have swollen beyond any reasonable raison d’etre, “proliferating in his hands into endless preliminary sketches for a study, based entirely on his own views, of the family likeness between all these buildings.” For a while, the narrator visits Austerlitz regularly in London, but they fall out of touch until 1996, when he happens to meet Austerlitz again, this time at Liverpool Street Station. Austerlitz explains that only recently has he learned the story of his life, and he needs the kind of listener that the narrator had been in Belgium, thirty years before.
