Austerlitz
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.
Nothing happens for the first fifty pages except Belgian railway stations and a fortress, and readers say they nearly quit there. There are “no chapters to provide natural breaks,” barely paragraphs, one sentence running nine pages, so setting the book down means rereading to find your place. No quotation marks either, which leaves you unsure whether Austerlitz or the narrator is speaking, in a book where the narrator relays what Austerlitz relayed from someone else. Austerlitz himself “knows a lot of data but somehow doesn’t really know much else.” Readers call the digressions self-indulgent excess and the close a “sudden and arbitrary ending.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
