The late W.G. Sebald wrote novels of elusive complexity, in which allusion, digression, and scholarly elaboration served to contribute small shards of meaning to what would become a mosaic of a plot. AUSTERLITZ is Sebald's finest example of this way of writing, in which the recovery of memory, dammed by repression and the passage of time, becomes the distant goal. Jacques Austerlitz is a retired art historian who, until he was fifteen, believed that he was Dafydd Elias, raised from the age of four by a dour Welsh minister. Now, in conversations with the narrator, taking place over thirty years in railway stations, he reveals his search for his identity, finding himself to be the child of Prague Jews, one killed in the Holocaust, the other missing.
From the community