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Review of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz
(New York: Random House), 2001, 298 pp., ($25.95)
Reviewed by Dr. Christopher M. Leighton

To read W. G. Sebald is to enter into a state of mind where the boundaries of consciousness are reconfigured. Austerlitz, Sebald's most recent work, yet again reveals a writer whose haunting and evocative gifts are frequently compared to Borges, Kafka, and, I would add, Aharon Appelfeld. This book recounts a series of interrupted conversations in which Jacques Austerlitz delivers a mix of memories and musings to the narrator over a period of thirty years. Beginning with his displacement as a young boy who is transported to England in the summer of 1939 by his desperate mother and father, Austerlitz excavates memories of his new environment and recalls the demands of the Calvinist minister and his wife who wash away the connections to the land, language, and people of his home, most especially his parents. While attending boarding school, Austerlitz learns his real name, but the psychological imperative to avoid the claims of his earliest past drive him deeper and deeper from his own story into the rarified study of architecture. Yet the structures and monuments that captivate his imagination are themselves laden with clues to unlock the structural secrets of western political power beneath which his own identity is buried. The harder he strains to escape his past, the more firmly he feels its suffocating embrace.

These narrative bones do not disclose the underlying vitality of this book, and I suspect that any summation will only betray its mysterious interiority. The narrator, who remains largely hidden behind the details of Austerlitz's ramblings, pulls the reader into worlds where dreams, memories, random associations, and reflections are seamlessly fused. To illustrate the affective dislocation of this peculiar genre, we need only to consider a sequence of photographs that the reader sporadically encounters throughout the book. On the one hand, these images anchor the narrative in a specific time and place, pressing the reader to step outside the familiar parameters of fiction. On the other hand, the pictures evoke a lost and irretrievable past, and the reader is left holding a collection of fragments that beg to be reassembled into a coherent whole. Austerlitz used to play a game with the images that he had accumulated over the years. Seated at a table, he turned the photos on their backs and shuffled them into an unknown order. Then he would slowly flip them right side up, one by one, trying to detect an alternative meaning within his own story, a meaning that remained largely hidden from his view. This book invites us to become participants in this game. The images are almost randomly tossed into a developing solution, and they slowly emerge as the fixed signs of consciousness. Every element gives a new depth to the story and extends the horizons of our awareness. Only our concentrated attention to the details discloses a more fixed and disturbing reality, and it is the discernment of this insight into our own time and our own place that makes the careful contemplation of this book register as a sacred obligation.

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