1 post tagged “austerlitz”
Sent away by his family to live in Wales to escape the ever-tightening grip of the Third Reich, young Jacques Austerlitz grows to excel in melancholy and architectural history. He becomes older, becomes richer, and plagued by a murky past, eventually trots around Europe in search of the phantoms of his father and mother. He meets our nameless narrator, and they proceed to talk about his journey. They also digress and are fabulously more articulate than we mere mortals can ever hope to be.
I read Austerlitz for a history class, and my reading experience had all the ups and downs of poring through a Required Book. On one hand, hurrah for exposure to a book I would have never, ever thought of reading! On the other hand, boo for having to rush through a dense, and extraordinarily subtle novel with tears streaming down my cheeks and an Essay, An Enormous Essay -- in Three Days! looming over my mind.
At first glance, Austerlitz is, well, not the most intimidating novel; it's relatively slim -- packing only a little more than 400 pages -- and also, it's got pictures! But, it's also deceptively unwelcoming. First off, the format? Prickly and difficult to digest, and even more difficult to get in to, Austerlitz is all dense text; no paragraphs, no chapters, no breaks. Just a sea of sentences, with an occasional murky diagram. The entire novel reads like a marathon for the first fifty pages or so. But cut through your initial revulsion and anger at Sebald, and let him lay waste to your soul.
Because Austerlitz is utterly devastating. It's difficult to pin down exactly which part of Sebald's writing picks your heart out of its teeth, but it's somewhere, between all of intricate, delicate prose, and the menagerie of photographs, diagrams, and xeroxed memos. Picking through Austerlitz is like picking through an old memoir; reading the novel feels vaguely voyeuristic and intrusive, but also, entirely engrossing. Sebald has made a living off of unsettled melancholy and mild-mannered depression; and here, he paints the perfect portrait of an unshakeable, unknowable sense of loss that has seeped into every secret crack. His care in choosing the exact word and the exact sentence shows; Austerlitz is many things, but above all it is beautifully written.
Now, I preferred the earlier section of the novel to the latter. The first half of the novel is all about stunted nostalgia, a sense of loss without knowing what has been lost. The second half is all about a search and a hunt that hasn't ditched nostalgia, hasn't lost the loss, but has acquired a sort of rabid, hyperventilating need to find. And the first half is much more meticulous; every detail of every year is listed with obsessive detail, while in the second half, time seems to sprawl across decades, and events seem to blur our years so that the narrative itself feels a little flimsy. Maybe it's not so much a weakness, as a change of pace that I couldn't really appreciate.
Sebald doesn't end with a bang, and doesn't really even reach a definitive conclusion; he leaves us with a sense of utter ambiguity and glum, unsatisfied yearning. Because there are really only so many synonyms you can use for 'melancholy.'
