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Austerlitz
Penguin
Paperback : 04 Jul 2002
£9.99
Synopsis
In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz – having avoided all clues that might point to his origin – finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened to him fifty years before …
Reviews
Customer Review: 27 September 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Northampton
The terrors which underly this remarkable book barely prick its surface yet are all the more haunting for that. The photographs add a sense of mystery yet reinforce the strange dislocation of Austerlitz the traveller, who as we all do, simply fades away into the ether before the end. I had not realised that WG Sebald had died, and only wish I'd had the chance to meet this incredible writer and kindred spirit.
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Customer Review: 11 September 2002Critic Review:
'His tale of one man's odyssey through the dark ages of European history is one of the most moving and true fictions in the postwar world. The Joyce of the 21st century'
Times
'Sebald's best book yet'
Geoff Dyer, Independent on Sunday
'Childhood, displacement, loss, nostalgia and, above all, fear - the fear of history, of event, of human cruelty, of the pain of recollection - find their deepest and most brutal form of expression here. His art is a form of justice - there can be no higher aim'
Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard
'With this superb book Sebald has confirmed his reputation as a major novelist'
Sunday Telegraph
'Compelling. Austerlitz [is] the most accomplished of Sebald's works'
Anita Brookner, Spectator
Esther Freud, Observer
'A work of obvious genius and an extraordinary writer way above most of his contemporaries'
Literary Review
'Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald. A profound, alluring masterwork of singular genius'
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
'Full of moving things and happenings ... One of the most important writers of our time'
A S Byatt, New Statesman
'A new kind of writing, combining fiction, memoir, travelogue, philosophy and much else besides ... greatness in literature is still possible'
John Banville, Irish Times
Mail on Sunday
'Deadpan comedy, romantic scene-painting, mellifluous yet painstaking style ... Sebald makes exquisite art out of vile history'
Boyd Tonkin, Independent
