Austerlitz

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This novel – it is also worth noting – is a work of great erudition that is almost encyclopaedic at times, reflecting Austerlitz and the narrator’s – therefore, Sebald’s – keen passion for knowledge and scholarly study. The pace certainly suffers from this, but the love and power instilled in these passages is such that they considerably enhance the reading experience, and Sebald no doubt intended for them to add substantial layering to his narrative. Opera ardita, che si spinge in alto, come la torre di Babele: e forse proprio questo ha determinato il caos e l’inconcludenza di questo mio commento.

As I sit here at my computer writing this review, contemplating my reading experience, I have the strong urge to reread it. This time I will be completely zoned in, impervious to distractions, and grasp the nuance of every sentence the moment I read it (I do beguile myself). I want to brush away the feeling that I failed the book in some way. With that feeling, I also feel euphoric, like I’ve ventured into something unknown and came away a better person. New vistas may have opened up in my mind. What else can I deduce from all this other than that the book is a masterpiece? At first sight, Austerlitz is a story of a man who looks for traces of his lost family and struggles to reconstruct his past. I think it would be easier to enumerate the things this book is not than enlist what it is: a Holocaust testimony, a philosophical treaty on time, an essay on architecture, language, photography, nature and travelling, a fictional biography, a psychological study, a Bildungsroman, a historical fiction, an adoption story, to name just a few. The way the photos converse with the text is astonishing and the fact that they are fictional makes me admire W.G. Sebald’s creativity even more. e qui, sull’altra fotografia, disse Věra dopo qualche istante, qui ci sei tu, Jacquot, nel febbraio del 1939, più o meno sei mesi prima della tua partenza da Praga. Avevi avuto il permesso di accompagnare Agáta a un ballo in maschera in casa di uno dei suoi influenti ammiratori e, apposta per l’occasione, ti confezionarono questo costume tutto bianco. Jacquot Austerlitz, páže růžové královny, è scritto sul retro per manod i tuo nonno, che proprio in quei giorni era in visita da noi. [p.197-198] In this book, Claude Manceron recreates Austerlitz minute by minute, hour by hour. The reader becomes a privileged witness; we are in the headquarters of the Emperors as they prepare to trap the Grande Armee; in the bivouac of Napoleon where his plan, elaborated bit by bit, changes the trap into a countertrap. We stand on the hill with Soult; charge with the Imperial Guard.They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementos stranded in the Terezín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them.” The Battle of Trafalgar, oil on canvas by John Christian Schetky, c. 1841; in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. (more)

Vertigo, first published in German in 1990 and English in 1999 (translation by Hulse) opens with a biography of a Marie-Henri Beyle, the real name of the French realist writer Stendhal. Brief but oddly detailed, it lays out Beyle’s role in the Napoleonic wars and examines his mental and physical ailments, including a venereal infection and the symptoms of syphilis: “difficulties in swallowing, swellings in his armpits, and pains in his atrophying testicles [which] troubled him especially”. Dopo aver letto il piacevole breve testo "Il passeggiatore solitario", belle pagine sulle tracce di un altro grande, R. Walser, m'attendevo qualcosa di diverso da questo libro, "Austerlitz", salutato dai critici come autentico capolavoro, il cui protagonista è un docente di Storia dell'Architettura, studioso solitario spesso in viaggio per l'Europa, visitatore di luoghi particolari e, benché non in primo piano, alla ricerca delle proprie misteriose origini. E.G.Sebald her eserinde beni şaşırtmaya devam ediyor. Asla kendini tekrarlamıyor. Bu kez 4 paragraflık bir kurgu ile birbirine son derece yumuşak geçiş yapan upuzun cümlelerle öykülerini bir anlatıcı (kendisi ?) ağzından, bir romana ismini veren kahramanımız Austerlitz’in ağzından anlatıyor. Tabii kendi tanımıyla hiçbir hayvanlar ansiklopedisinde anlatılmayan özel bir hayvan türü olan “insanı” odağına alarak. Yazarın çocukluk travması olan savaşın yıkımını bu kez Austerlitz’in gözünden okuyoruz.Most of them were silent, some wept quietly, but outbursts of despair, loud shouting and fits of frenzied rage were not uncommon."

The rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the subsequent German invasion of Czechoslovakia meant that his father had to flee to Paris, never to be seen or heard from again, his letters to his family confiscated by the German authorities. His mother managed to arrange for her son to be sent on a Kindertransport to London. He was adopted by a Nonconformist preacher and his wife, near Bala in North Wales. Smith, Charles Saumarez (29 September 2001). "Observer review: Austerlitz by WG Sebald". The Observer . Retrieved 11 April 2013. None of the people Jacques will encounter is commonplace. Yet, all who have a wealth of knowledge are passionate about a place, a city, or a fortification. They have a story, a life to tell. They are almost obsessed with each in their corner with insects or butterflies, parrots, the history of cities, railway stations, cemeteries, and quiet buildings today, which have been places of torture and deportation. Austerlitz has a distinctive hallucinatory feel about it, its seeping, overflowing pain making it both subdued and unforgettably compelling. You feel this narrative – its undercurrent of the most inextinguishable emotions of humankind – more so than reading it. 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.Edificios como la estación de la Calle Liverpool, en Londres. Un día, a finales de los 80, durante una de sus caminatas sin rumbo, Austerlitz se cuela, en parte por curiosidad, en parte huyendo de la gente, en la parte antigua de la estación, cerrada al público desde hace años y a punto de ser demolida para hacer sitio a la una más grande y moderna, e igualmente inhumana. 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. Recently, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a series of five fifteen-minute audio essays from people who knew Sebald (or Max, as he preferred to be called—he hated his first name, Winfried, because he felt that it sounded too much like the woman’s name Winnifred). Contributors include his English translator Anthea Bell, the poet George Szirtes, and the academic and novelist Christopher Bigsby, a colleague of Sebald’s at the University of East Anglia. La narración se construye a partir de relatos aparentemente inconexos, como viejas fotografías tomadas al azar―un fragmento de cielo, una puerta en un edificio abandonado, un rostro desenfocado, un par de árboles en la distancia―encontradas en un cajón olvidado. Sebald coge una foto del cajón y habla sobre ella sin prisa, conectando distintos recuerdos, deteniéndose en cada detalle. En unas ocasiones muestra su erudición, en otras, un gran conocimiento de la naturaleza humana; siempre, un agudo sentido de la observación. De repente, deja caer la foto de su mano y toma la siguiente para continuar la conversación en el mismo punto. Nada parece ceñirse a un plan concreto, pero en cuanto Sebald de detiene y se hace el silencio cae uno en la cuenta que todas esas fotografías esparcidas sin orden ni sentido por el suelo han formado una imagen completa, precisa, detallada: el mapa de la Historia reciente de Europa, el de la barbarie y la crueldad de los últimos doscientos años, desde el colonialismo belga al Holocausto. Son los planos de una red de locura y aniquilación―fortalezas decimonónicas transformadas en campos de concentración; estaciones de tren abarrotadas de deportados; inmensos almacenes repletos de objetos requisados en los pogromos, meticulosamente catalogados; modernas bibliotecas nacionales, diseñadas para ocultar celosamente la información que deberían transmitir―que cubrió Europa durante el siglo XX, construida sobre las ruinas de otras anteriores, empleadas en guerras y pogromos ya olvidados. Una red habitada con la presencia de los fantasmas de los que han pasado, como si pudieran regresar para juzgarnos por no haber sido capaces de salvarles o, al menos, de recordarles como merecían. Each word weighed, each description of the place, and each historical or cultural reference is a pleasure. What knowledge accumulated was made available to the reader. Maybe a little too complicated, sometimes seeming accumulated unnecessarily.

Di fronte a pagine monolitiche, prive di interruzioni e a capo, con periodi lunghi, ricerca del dettaglio e frequenti digressioni, ci si può perdere: ma non qui. And so Austerlitz begins the story that will gradually occupy the rest of the book: how he was brought up in a small town in Wales by foster parents; how he discovered, as a teenager, that his true name was not Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz; how he went to Oxford, and then into academic life. Though clearly a refugee, for many years he was unable to discover the precise nature of his exile until he experienced a visionary moment, in the late 1980s, in the Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station. Standing transfixed for perhaps hours, in a room hitherto unknown to him (and about to be demolished, to enable an expansion of the Victorian station), he feels as if the space contains ‘all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained’. He suddenly sees, in his mind’s eye, his foster parents, ‘but also the boy they had come to meet’, and he realises that he must have arrived at this station a half-century ago.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… Austerlitz by Claude Manceron is a lively, dramatic narrative history which relates the story of Napoleon’s 1805 campaign and, in particular, its climatic conclusion at the battle of Austerlitz on December 2nd. What distinguishes this book from other histories of this campaign is the author’s style of narrative. Manceron writes as though he is telling a story. He does this by developing the historical personalities, bringing them to life through his selection and sequence of scenes and by delving into the dialogue, thoughts, and feelings of some of the principal figures. Austerlitz is, in many ways, another literary tour de force, using the same language of extended and ostensibly inconsequential melancholy to describe the life of someone whom he first meets in the railway station in Antwerp studying the architecture of its waiting room.