Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald, Anthea Bell · first published 2001
71% recommend14% neutral14% critical
"Austerlitz is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from obliv
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I still love the great beauty (film). Hits on themes I don’t see taken on very often. For books, Austerlitz by WG Sebald.
on “Ask HN: Underrated Music, Books, Movies?” ↗I read Austerlitz and thought it was fantastic.
on “W.G. Sebald – The Posthumous Sublime (2006)” ↗…each read, and always the same marveling at our world, the tragedy we make in it, and what an imagination could have captured this. Highlights of the scant recordings we have of him are: - Reading from Austerlitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccMCGjWLlhY - An interview with Michael Silverblatt shortly before his death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSFcTWIg-Pg
on “Texts in Sebald’s the Rings of Saturn (2013)” ↗This review is written from a solidly Jewish-American perspective, and your experience of Sebald's work may differ. Just get a copy of Austerlitz and start reading. It won't make sense for a while. Don't get bogged down, skim if you have to. Peer at the photos, as if from a distance of fifty years. The narrator is in a kind of fog, as if the only…
on “W.G. Sebald – The Posthumous Sublime (2006)” ↗…of a volume of mainstream essays the spade-work left over from a life of academic toil can only diminish the posthumous reputation of a writer who, in books such as The Rings of Saturn and the superb Austerlitz, showed himself to be one of the last masters from the great age of Mitteleuropean high literature that is now drawing to a close, in its own silent catastrophe.' https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/07/silent-catastr...
on “No Way Home” ↗Recently his name kept popping up so I decided to read Austerlitz. I don't read enough books in German, which is my mother tongue, so I thought I'd give it a try but, honestly, it's a slog. Lots of interesting bits but the language is too pretentious and strained for…
on “W.G. Sebald and the Malthusian Tragic” ↗…Nazi past of his family when reading this, but it doesn't come across strongly, at least in this book. In any case it's incredibly moving and I'm now looking forward to reading it again (perhaps after Austerlitz, which I haven't read).
on “The secret trauma that inspired German literary giant WG Sebald” ↗