Review to follow

3.5 rounded up. This is good, but I feel like for how dry it is it might as well have been straight biography. If you're going to take the liberty of making people up in real events, make them a bit more lively, or interesting at least? This is still delivering an important snippet of history, and there were several lines of genius writing, so I'm not surprised it's well loved. ( )

How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end? ( )

A friend of mine lent me this book, ostensibly because she no longer wanted a visible reminder of having had to write an essay about it in her undergraduate days. Her copy had circles around every reference to white or black, which emphasised to me how little colour is mentioned throughout. The novel is quite rich with description, but it’s as monochrome as the photographs scattered through the text.

I am somewhat embarrassed that, despite having read a Sebald novel before, it took me 148 pages to notice that there were no paragraph breaks. Indeed, at one point I realised that the sentence I was reading had lasted for an incredible 12 pages. Despite this, and the lack of speech marks, I found ‘Austerlitz’ very digestible. Perhaps too much so, in fact. I had to reread the odd page having realised I’d skimmed over it so quickly that I hadn’t the faintest idea what it had contained. I like Sebald’s stream-of-consciousness travelogue style, although I think I preferred [b:The Rings of Saturn|434903|The Rings of Saturn|W.G. Sebald|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386921954s/434903.jpg|17952027]. I found all the business with fortresses and their inevitably becoming obsolete rather fascinating. The air of melancholy was evoked very effectively, although I expected more focus on the aftermath of the Second World War. Initially this was not the case, although latter half of the novel picked it up. It was foolish to expect focus from a Sebald novel, though, they are diffuse, digressive, and indirect. Also very beautifully written. ( )

Our anonymous narrator transcribes the extraordinarily articulate narration of Austerlitz, a refugee adopted as a young child in Wales in the early part of WW2. Austerlitz only learns of his origins, and only vaguely, when his last parent dies. As he tells his story to our narrator, we learn of his despair and inability to be close to anyone or anything, and his search for his past. Star shaped buildings and stars themselves play a role that I didn’t quite grasp. As Austerlitz slowly pieces together his past we learn of the holocaust and the complicity of peoples across Europe in its execution.
This was related, but very distinct to the two other novels by Sebald I’ve read, Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. Both of those were essentially travelogs where you learn about the nature of memory from tales of the past rooted in the present. Austerlitz shared some elements, such as the nature of memory, but the third party narration makes it less like you are hearing Sebald in your head, with its wonderful quirkiness. It is excellent, and heartbreaking, but not quite as good as the other two. ( )