Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald has a little bit of Marcel Proust, something of James Joyce, a dose of Freud and a lot of post-WWII PTSD. The landscape is usually desolate, the lighting dark; the often-abandoned buildings are old, dank and soot-stained, all reeking of imagined history. Even when there are crowds, there is loneliness, setting the tone for the ruminations of the character, retold by an anonymous narrator. 

The source of the stream-of-consciousness ramblings is the character Jacques Austerlitz, struggling to discover who he really is. As the Nazis closed in on Eastern Europe, his parents in Prague had put him on a train to the UK, part of a large children’s transport.  He was subsequently adopted by a stern Welsh minister named Elias, and the child knew himself as Davydd Elias.  Years later, Austerlitz remembers his loneliness as that child in boarding school, but there’s a gap in his memory that he will later struggle to clarify.  As an adult, he becomes a historian of architecture, and his life is measured by his writings and black-and-white photographs of buildings, which are included here in Austerlitz’s accounts, presented by the narrator.  Each building that Austerlitz describes to the narrator triggers for him a whiff of memory of somewhere else. Railway stations are particularly evocative, though Austerlitz isn’t certain why. 

He met the narrator in a railroad station in the U.K. A friendship develops, and, over several decades the narrator meets up with Austerlitz and becomes the repository for his stories. Austerlitz becomes obsessed by minutiae as he recounts things his mind randomly fixates on: the sights and smells of villages he has walked through, ancient city fortifications, dead moths, homing pigeons, almost any subject to which his meandering mind takes him.

As he ages, he retrieves shreds of his own history and travels to Prague and its Jewish ghetto, where he locates a woman who had babysat for him before the German invasion. She helps him probe the story of his parents and what happened to them during the war. He scrupulously details life in Terezin (Theresienstadt to the Germans), the Prague ghetto, the brutality, the deaths, the fake milieu the Germans created to demonstrate to the Red Cross the “benign” nature of their treatment of Jewish prisoners.

Another poignant sequence is a trip to the Marienbad spa with a female friend. It echoes the 1961 “Last Year at Marienbad” book by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s and the equally enigmatic Alain Renais avant-garde movie by the same name. Published 40 years later, Austerlitz is about a search for oneself, buried memories, the need to be heard, the loneliness deriving from the struggle, the resulting inability to enter meaningful relationships. 

Sebald’s style is idiosyncratic – no paragraphs, an inordinate number of run-on sentences, infinitely detailed descriptions becoming a vortex of images and partial recollections. The style comes to reflect the increasing derangement of Austerlitz himself, who ends up in long-term confinement in a mental hospital.

This is definitely not a beach read. Sometimes I found it a puzzling and pretentious literary abstraction and, at other times, an authentic plunge into the many-layered depths of life’s experiences and a continuing discovery of new truths about the universal human experience. Still, I’d characterize my feeling of reading Austerlitz more as a task accomplished than a pleasure savored.

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