Austerlitz

Product Information

Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.”

The narrative, if it is true, is a remarkable one. The hero of the book, or more properly the anti-hero since he essentially does nothing especially useful with his life, was born in Prague, the son of a moderately successful opera singer and the manager of a small slipper-making factory who was also active in left-wing politics. It is impossible to tell how much of this narrative, if any, is true, although it is illustrated, as was Rings of Saturn, with out-of-focus, grey photographs of people and places, which lend it veracity, most of all the picture of the narrator himself, with his distinctive wavy hair, looking out inqusitively at the photographer and dressed as for a fancy dress party in Prague just before the war. On the face of it, it’s not an easy sell; the narrator (who may or may not be Sebald himself) embarks on a walk along the Suffolk coast “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness” brought on after completing a “a long stint of work”. Part travelogue, part ramble through the narrator’s vast, troubled and troubling thoughtscape, it is also, as Robert McCrum put it, “ a strange and deep response to the atrocities of history”. The meandering prose takes in topics as peculiar and diverse as “The natural history of the herring,” “The battle of Sole Bay” and “The Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi.”The more we come to know Austerlitz in his recounting of his past, how he arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee, age four, from Nazi infested Czechoslovakia, how he was adopted and raised by an older Welsh minister and his wife, how, as an adult, he returned to Prague and located a close friend of his vanished mother and father, how he then further traced the fate of his parents, the more our hearts open not only to Austerlitz and his family but all the many men and women and children who suffered the brutality and madness of the Nazis. Así comienza una conversación sobre Arquitectura e Historia, jalonada por lúcidas observaciones acerca de la identidad, la decadencia, el poder o la memoria que, en contra de toda lógica y gracias a una serie de encuentros tan casuales como el primero, se va a prolongar durante casi tres décadas. Durante estos años, a medida que Austerlitz habla, la Historia—así, con mayúsculas—se va transformando en historia, la suya: su infancia carente de alegría con sus padres de adopción, en una miserable aldea galesa en los años 40; el descubrimiento, siendo ya adolescente, de que no había nacido en el Reino Unido, sino en algún país de Centroeuropa, que su verdadero nombre es Austerlitz y que probablemente sus padres eran judíos; o su vida universitaria en Oxford, donde se hizo evidente que tenía problemas para relacionarse con los demás y que prefería la compañía de libros o vagar visitando esos monumentales edificios que tanto le fascinaban.

Although Trafalgar spelled an end to France’s naval ambitions, the War of the Third Coalition would be a resounding success for Napoleon. To some degree, Napoleon’s campaign against Austria may be regarded as a measure of self-defense forced upon him by the formation of the anti-French alliance. The possibility of it had long been before the emperor, and as early as 1803 he had formulated a plan for a march on Vienna through the valley of the Danube. When it became clear that Villeneuve had failed in his purpose of securing the command of the Channel, Napoleon initiated the transfer of his whole army to the Rhine frontier as the first step in its march to the Danube. Maneuvers in Bavaria and the Battle of Ulm And I have read few books that provide such an intense sense of place and the relationship of buildings to their history, including, for example, a hypnotic description of how Austerlitz discovers the streets where he was born, as well as of particular places, from Antwerp railway station to Tower Hamlets cemetery.Unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.” It freaks me out to contemplate the idea that a race of people can die out and that their language only survives in the feeble lexicon of a handful of parrots. Per quanto riguarda l’altra questione, direi che questo libro è la quintessenza del romanzo, e che del genere ‘romanzo’ utilizza espedienti vari e ingegnosi: l’intreccio di materiali diversi (storia, riflessione filosofica, cronaca, fotografia, architettura, pittura, botanica, entomologia…), la ricerca-indagine, il cambiamento dei punti di vista (costantemente due, il narratore e Austerlitz, e di quando in quando, ne entra un terzo, Vera sopra tutti, ma anche altri testimoni/commentatori/portatori di informazioni che Austerlitz più o meno casualmente incontra e incrocia), le scatole cinesi, il racconto nel racconto… al punto che io per tutto il tempo della lettura ho avuto in mente film (“F For Fake” di Welles, “L'hypothèse du tableau volé”, e sempre di Ruiz, “Les trois couronnes du matelot” con quella incredibile fotografia di Sacha Vierny che da sola genera immagini e atmosfera e attesa) e Cortazar e… People with an extraordinary destiny, probably. It would be difficult to understand that such people remain in the shadows.

It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other. And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad."As for the protagonist’s surname, I agree with James Wood’s analysis (the battle of Austerlitz --> Auschwitz) but I also thought the fact that Jacques's family name begins with an A and ends with a Z might suggest that the character’s experiences are a summa of many, many others. Austerlitz is akin to Everyman. An exciting book, which "deserves," not easy to read and follow ... sometimes destabilizing. However, the narrators intersect, their words support each other, and their knowledge of Jacques mingles with the narrator or people they meet. For the oral part of the Cambridge English exam you are given a few pictures and are told to imagine stories out of them. It feels like this novel is written the same way. Sebald (randomly) chooses a number of pictures from his collection and gives himself the challenge to invent stories from them and put everything in one book. Then, he writes excruciatingly boring details of Belgian architecture. After realising that even he falls asleep while reading his writing, he decides to introduce some resemblance of a plot and to give something to read to critics and literature enthusiasts. He even adds some magical realism because how else can you name those coincidental and convenient encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz. . The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s claim that “Sebald is more like a new kind of historian than a new kind of novelist” might be too provocative for its own good, but it is an indication of the extent to which his work has yet to be placed within a secure canonical niche. The books are fascinating for the way they inhabit their own self-determined genre, but that’s not ultimately why they are essential reading. There is a moral magnitude and a weary, melancholy wisdom in Sebald’s writing that transcends the literary and attains something like an oracular register. Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream. He does away with the normal proceedings of narrative fiction—plot, characterization, events leading to other events—so that what we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice. That voice is an extraordinary presence in contemporary literature, and it may be another decade before the magnitude—and the precise nature—of its utterances are fully realized. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.”

While he uses excellent sources, listed in his bibliography, he fails to cite them throughout the text. This issue would be more egregious were it not for the fact that some of the stories he relates are related numerous times elsewhere, in properly sourced monographs. The real problem is when it seems that the author may, or may not, have fabricated conversations or pieces of them for dramatic effect. Though the plethora of memoirs and diaries in his bibliography asserts that, likely, he drew from those, just couldn't be bothered to source them. In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before. Austerlitz is W.G. Sebald's melancholic masterpiece.

A medida que Austerlitz narra la búsqueda de sus orígenes perdidos en las ruinas de un continente arrasado por la guerra, la novela se mueve, de un modo delicado y sutil, entre lo trascendente y lo cotidiano, entre la realidad y la ficción. Los acontecimientos históricos relatados por Sebald están dotados de una dimensión irreal, casi de cuento de hadas. Episodios como el campo de trabajo de concentración de Terezín y la película de propaganda que los nazis filmaron allí para mostrar al mundo que centros de exterminio y guetos eran agradables lugares de retiro para trabajadores judíos y sus familias, son mucho más difíciles de creer que las historias imaginarias con las que comparten página. Al mismo tiempo, los personajes ficticios son tan reales que, aunque es poco probable que Austerlitz haya existido fuera de la mente del autor, el lector se niega a creerlo. At dawn, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée was assembled near the tiny village of Austerlitz, some 60 miles from Vienna. There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes? Questo libro sfavillante di cultura ci regala anche alcune brevi e fulminanti immagini di personaggi famosi : Schumann salvato "nelle acque gelide del Reno" ; oppure Casanova ormai vecchio e canuto bibliotecario nel castello di Dux tra uno sfarfallio di libri. no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice in the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”