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tdbrwn 's review for:
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Second time reading. My thoughts on it haven’t changed very much since the first time in 2017. Brilliant.
Sebald takes all the tools used in his masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, and rearranges them in a different toolbox, one more conventional, more novelistic. The weight of history, memory, disaster, and decline now circle around the character of Austerlitz (the unnamed author-narrator providing the narrative frame). Despite the main narrative being supposedly one step removed from the consciousness of the narrator, the result is somehow less abstract than Rings, grounded as it is in the character Austerlitz. Whereas Rings is a natural history, Austerlitz is a personal history of destruction.
That aside, the content follows many of the same thematic lines as Rings, which raises the question: which form suits them better? In my opinion, the comparatively unique form of Rings is part of what makes it so special and, because of that, Austerlitz doesn’t quite reach those heights. (You can also see, however, why Austerlitz has achieved more widespread success.) Still, Sebald’s prose (and that of his translator here, Anthea Bell) is at its absolute peak and his magic is on full display; the soaring sentences and dreamlike transitions are up their with his best.
Sebald takes all the tools used in his masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, and rearranges them in a different toolbox, one more conventional, more novelistic. The weight of history, memory, disaster, and decline now circle around the character of Austerlitz (the unnamed author-narrator providing the narrative frame). Despite the main narrative being supposedly one step removed from the consciousness of the narrator, the result is somehow less abstract than Rings, grounded as it is in the character Austerlitz. Whereas Rings is a natural history, Austerlitz is a personal history of destruction.
That aside, the content follows many of the same thematic lines as Rings, which raises the question: which form suits them better? In my opinion, the comparatively unique form of Rings is part of what makes it so special and, because of that, Austerlitz doesn’t quite reach those heights. (You can also see, however, why Austerlitz has achieved more widespread success.) Still, Sebald’s prose (and that of his translator here, Anthea Bell) is at its absolute peak and his magic is on full display; the soaring sentences and dreamlike transitions are up their with his best.