Austerlitz

For Jacques Austerlitz, the architectural historian and eponymous protagonist of W.G Sebald's mesmerizing Austerlitz, history is a nightmare first forgotten then slowly, painfully recalled. A chance encounter in an Austrian train station with the book's retreating, unnamed narrator sets off a continuing conversation that traverses decades, memories, and locales, and tells the story of Austerlitz's circuitous, maddening search for his origins. From the depths of his repressed memories, he recalls how his family was torn apart by the spread of Nazi troops across Europe: it is in the train station that his first memory - being sent by his mother to a family in Wales for his adoption - resurfaces. During the course of the book, Austerlitz comes to understand that the repeated presence of the narrator, who is melancholic in his own way, helps him to release his long-buried memories. Though the format of the text is presented in daunting, solid paragraphs, the stories of both Austerlitz and the narrator held within those margins create the cumulative effect of viewing a dreamily illustrated scroll as it rolls itself out across a vast expanse. Scattered across its surface is an intriguing array of uncaptioned images, predominantly architectural, but ranging from the known edges of the universe via Hubble Telescope to a postage stamp from Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto and eventual concentration camp. A stately meditation on time and its effects on the ephemeral evidence of human existence, Austerlitz is one of Sebald's best books, but also, sadly, his last one.