About this title: The narrator of Sebald's fourth novel meets Jacques Austerlitz in a railroad station, and from there their friendship continues, revolving around a series of conversations, ostensibly about architecture but soon expanding to include the details of Austerlitz's life. The narrator learns that he was separated from his true parents at the age of 5, when they were killed in the Holocaust, and raised in Wales with no knowledge of his past--a personal history he unraveled much later in life. The story is illustrated mysteriously with photographs of buildings and people. A New York Times "Editor's ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780375504839ISBN:0375504834
Description: Good. Used item may show library stamps, stickers and marks. Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Date Published: 2002-09-03
ISBN-13:9780375756566ISBN:0375756566
Description: Good. Paperback ARC book with plain cover and publisher stickers. Save some $$$. Perfectly Good Reading Copy. Shelfwear from storage in box with other books. Great Copy. Ships Lightning Fast. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 2001-10-02
ISBN-13:9780375504839ISBN:0375504834
Description: VG in VG jacket. 2001 hardcover, ex-library book with usual library markings. Stated First Edition. DJ is in mylar cover. Book is VG and has not been checked out. No markings other than library. read more
Description: Very Good. 0375756566 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Binding is slightly damaged and/or book has some loose pages. No missing pages. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 2001-10-02
ISBN-13:9780375504839ISBN:0375504834
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. Clean hardcover in unclipped dustjacket. Top front corner gently bumped, slight edge wear to top of jacket, else fine. Binding tight and square, pages clean and bright. 2001 Random House, New York. Stated First Edition with full number line. Brown paper over boards, black paper quarter binding with silver foil spine print, matte finish dustjacket. 298 numbered pages. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780375756566ISBN:0375756566
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. Near-perfect condition. From seller's personal collection. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780375756566ISBN:0375756566
Description: New. No dust jacket as issued. Never read, excellent condition, no remainder marks. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House Inc, Westminster, Maryland, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780375504839ISBN:0375504834
Description: Hardback with dust jacket. First edition. Very Good with some wear along edges in a Good dust jacket that has dampstaining along bottom edge of jacket, creasing to spine and lower left corner of front cover, and some soiling to front cover. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: The Modern Library New York
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780375756566ISBN:0375756566
Description: Very Good+ No Jacket Issued. This is the story of a man who went back to his roots, back to the Holocaust. This is a First Paperback Edition (Stated), and a 1st Printing of this book. This book was the winner of the "National Book Critics Circle Award". The book is a soft cover Trade Paperback in Very Good+ conditition, no jacket issued. The cover is in very good, clean condition, with very little wear. The bonmding is good, and the spine is nice and straight. The spine is smooth-no reading ... read more
Binding: Audio Cassette
Publisher: Books on Tape, Newport Beach, California
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780736685504ISBN:0736685502
Description: Very Good in Good jacket. Ex-Library. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. CS3-5 very good cassettes that has label and library stamping in a good cover/case that has library markings and labels, some bumped corners, chipping and cracks, discoloration and shelf wear. Library Edition. Unabridged. 7.5 hours. Read by Richard Matthews. 9"x6.5". Satisfaction Guaranteed. read more
"I couldn't do it. I really wanted to finish this book. I finish every book I start, and even if I hate them, I enjoy writing scathing reviews. But as my wife pointed out, life is too short. It's not just the execrable prose style, which I'm sure is intentional and has some theoretical justification. It's not the photos- I quite like the idea of photos in novels. It's not just the idiotic attempts to be highbrow, by referencing Wittgenstein (whom the narrator thinks is a 'dark thinker'!) And it's not just the hype, which is nauseating (*this* is meant to stand up next to Kafka and Proust?) All of these things together, it's true, would give me pause. But what is truly insulting is the sub-liberal-guilt posture the narrator and Austerlitz assume: in this novel's world, all 'great' undertakings are merely hubristic and doomed to failure; all ambition for improving the world is bound to end up with the panopticon; and everything, everything, everything is in some sort of relationship to the holocaust. I figure this 'great idea' is the source of the book's popularity (my copy proudly proclaims 'NATIONAL BESTSELLER'). If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that the holocaust sucked balls. In the middle ages, almost everyone could agree that 'God is great.' The literature expressing this claim was profoundly, profoundly dull. Similarly, literature which tells us that the holocaust sucked balls is profoundly, profoundly dull. This is not deep thinking, this is platitude wrapped in an extraordinarily un-inventive form. All that said, maybe the second half is really great, mind-blowing even. I'll never know."
"When I told a mate, who is a fine man and whose opinion I respect, that I found Sebald's The Rings of Saturn difficult, he said, 'Read Austerlitz, you cantankerous old git. It's even better than Rings. Austerlitz is his Meisterwerk.' So I paid good money and started to read.
I reached page 218 before giving up. (I joked to my mate that this was halfway through the first paragraph but actually there may have been a few paragraph breaks up to this point.) Here is the sentence that did it for me. I reached it and it was like I was running a marathon and I hit that spot where the leg muscles give up and you simply can't put one foot in front of the other. Yes, I had hit Sebald's wall. Here it is:
(Austerlitz, now an adult, meets his old nursemaid, Vera, in Prague for the first time after a gap of many years): It was through an interest in every aspect of French civilization, she added, something which as an enthusiastic student of Romance culture I shared with both Agata and Maximilian, that a friendship began to develop between us immediately after our first conversation the day they moved in, a friendship which led as if quite naturally, so Vera told me, said Austerlitz, to her offering, since unlike Agata and Maximilian she had time largely at her own disposal, to assume the duties of nanny for the few years until I started nursery school.
If any person other than Sebald wrote this sentence in the first page of their manuscripts any (and I mean any) editor or agent would shake his or her head and throw the manuscript in the bin. How did Sebald get away with it?
By the way, I've been told this extract looks bad out of context that it sits more comfortably in its place on the page. Believe me, it doesn't. Even in context it's utter goobledegook.
Everybody tells me Sebald is quality - I think he's 'aving a laugh"
"Using a fractured frame narrative, Sebald turns this book into a resplendent meditation on how qualities triumph over cold facts, and how impressions reshape memory, time, and space. An example will make the author's style clearer. As we follow a man's journey to recapture the past, watch how Sebald describes a dingy London train station. The speaker, Austerlitz, finds himself ...
... unable to move from the spot, with my face raised to the icy gray light, like moonshine, which came through the windows in a gallery beneath the vaulted roof, and hung above me like a tight-meshed net or a piece of thick, fraying fabric. Although this light, a profusion of dusty glitter, one might almost say, was very bright near the ceiling, as it sank lower it looked as if it were being absorbed by the walls and the deeper reaches of the room, as if it merely added to the gloom and were running down in black streaks, rather like rainwater running down the smooth trunks of beech trees or over the cast concrete façade of a building. When the blanket of cloud above the city parted for a moment or two, occasional rays of light fell into the waiting room, but they were generally extinguished again halfway down. Other beams of light followed curious trajectories which violated the laws of physics, departing from the rectilinear and twisting in spirals and eddies before being swallowed up by the wavering shadows.
Did you feel light turn to water in that passage? Wow. That's brilliance. The concrete facts about this train station don't matter; the descriptive power of the prose tells everything relevant about this place.
Over the course of the book Austerlitz, a rather withdrawing protagonist, relates his story in bits and pieces to the man who actually narrates the novel - hence the framing and fracturing of the story. As this second- and third-hand memoir hints, the precise facts of Austerlitz's evanescent past don't mean as much as the impressions they've left behind.
The author's technique scores a direct hit, and the plot, good enough in itself, continually recedes from the foreground. Space and time are distorted, recast as qualities of the mind, their objectivity likewise receding from the reader. Evident about the prose from the excerpt above is the reliance on complex and compound sentences, a refreshing change of style for a work of contemporary literature.
In this European voyage of discovery, one man tries to locate and fix his past. But modernity itself impedes his efforts. The deluge of data and information of our world has the strange effect of scouring memory, rendering civilization and individuals alike devoid of history. Austerlitz must try to swim against this tide.
Anyone who likes literature will like this book, which comes with pictures inserted at key points in the text. This is the first time I've read Sebald. Now all I have to decide is which of his books to follow up with. What a sensory experience this one is, and for me what a change of pace."
"narrative by digression. really great - actually started reading it again the minute I finished it.... really haunting and filled with hundreds of small stories and images that really remain in the imagination....
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