The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 April 2016
by W. G. Sebald
Nostalgia and a need for a personal history are key features of our humanity. We go great distances, geographically and psychologically, to re-acquaint ourselves with the past. We visit our childhood homes, which are always smaller than we remembered them to be. We track down our ancestors, once through extensive research, and today through popular genealogy websites. We're even acquiring the habit of tracking our histories through our DNA. Our memories are tied to the landscape, to the buildings we remember, schools, houses, churches, entire neighborhoods and cities. But what of those of us who have no clear idea where we come from? The adopted ones, the orphans and refugees, the victims of great crimes and displacements? There, the drive to understand the past as key to identity is even stronger. The mystery is even deeper. What do we find out about our true selves when we discover unknown elements of our ancestry? It can be surprising how powerful that knowledge can be. And how liberating.
And so our narrator, on a trip to Belgium, meets one Jacques Austerlitz. The men seem to hit it off, as Austerlitz likes to tell stories about the architecture and history of the cities he visits. It is his academic pursuit, the study of civic architecture and history. We meet Austerlitz several times over thirty years, but, when we see him again, finally, in the 1990s, he has reached a point in his life at which he feels the need to tell the story of his life, and of his search for his identity in the vanished past of his family.
Austerlitz was among those children evacuated from Europe to Britain in the first years of World War 2. Taken in by foster parents, he was raised in Wales. He never knows of his true history until those foster parents die, a year or so before he leaves school. And it is then that he learns his true name. What ensues is a life full of a sense of loss or aimlessness. Austerlitz goes on to search for his parents on the European continent. The search itself isn't so much the story as the powerful sense of history and connections to the surviving artefacts of that history that Austerlitz feels during the search. It won't surprise the reader that the story is deeply entwined with the Holocaust. This is a unique and surprising telling of one aspect of that horror story. We finally visit the Jewish ghetto built at Terezin, and learn some of the terrible events that happened there. We visit Paris, as Austerlitz considers the remnants of French collaboration in the deportation of people to eastern concentration camps. And, while this is, of course, a dark story, it is oddly compelling and engrossing as well.
Sebald uses the odd inclusion of photographs to illustrate his story. The pictures lend a documentary feel to the highly descriptive text, which, itself, is reminiscent of the French nouveau roman style (i.e. that of Claude Simon). The text is dense, with few paragraph breaks and a rather remarkable quality of shifting seamlessly from one anecdote to another. There is a lot of accurate historical detail, though Austerlitz's own story is fictional. The reader will feel driven to seek out images of these places, and further details of the events that happened there. But, in the end, the story is about memory and identity, the artefacts that lend immediacy to memory. It is an investigation into the nature of memory and whether anything and any event that is situated in the past is, as Austerlitz suggests, still sitting there, waiting for us to return. Some powerful stuff here. Recommended.
Also by Sebald: [The Rings of Saturn]