Austerlitz

Name: Austerlitz
Author: W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald · 2001

Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, gradually discovers he was one of the Kindertransport children sent from Prague to Wales in 1939. Sebald's final novel (he died months after publication in 2001) is written in long, unbroken paragraphs that move like memory itself. The prose enacts the experience of repression and recovery. Susan Sontag called him the most important German writer since Thomas Mann.

The case against

on the chapter breaks
“no chapters to provide natural breaks”
four stars · a book blog
on the train stations
“spends a lot of time describing various train stations of Europe in painstaking detail”
a book blog
on Austerlitz himself
“knows a lot of data but somehow doesn’t really know much else”
a book blog
on the first 200 pages
“after page 200 or so that we suddenly realise where it is going”
a book blog