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Austerlitz
Reader Score
85%
85% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 5 reviews on
W. G. Sebald's celebrated masterpiece, "one of the supreme works of art of our time" (The Guardian), follows a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle.
"Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Kafka's troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
One of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the 21st Century - A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers' stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald's unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz's ongoing efforts to understand who he is--a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.
"Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Kafka's troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
One of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the 21st Century - A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers' stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald's unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz's ongoing efforts to understand who he is--a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.
Book Details
- Publisher: Modern Library
- Publish Date: Dec 6th, 2011
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Edition: Anniversary - 0010
- Dimensions: 8.10in - 5.30in - 0.90in - 0.75lb
- EAN: 9780812982619
- Categories: • Historical - General• Literary• Psychological
About the Author
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. His other books include After Nature, Campo Santo, and On the Natural History of Destruction. He died in December 2001.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"[A] beautiful novel . . . quietly breathtaking . . . Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz's story a broken, recessed enigma whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue."--James Wood, from the Introduction
"Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno's dictum that after it, there can be no art."--Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - NEW YORK MAGAZINE - ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award,
the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize,
and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize Translator Anthea Bell--Recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and
the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for
Outstanding Translation from German into English