Austerlitz

By: W. G. Sebald

Narrated by: Richard Matthews

Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle.

“Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize

A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.

Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.

©2017 W. G. Sebald (P)2017 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[A] beautiful novel . . . quietly breathtaking . . . Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue.”—James Wood, from the Introduction

“Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art.”—Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review

“Sebald is a rare and elusive species . . . but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. . . . He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“Sebald’s final novel; his masterpiece, and one of the supreme works of art of our time.”—John Banville, The Guardian

2/3 Architecture and dry historical references. Most unrelated to the plot.

Quotes not translated to English. Disjointed with long dry architectural references. The plot was a long time coming. Ended abruptly.

Audio version review - Don't hold your breath...

… or you might black out! Seriously, the orator must have lungs the size of a hot air balloon. The character Austerlitz is basically a cross between The Rainman and Forest Gump. I’m soooo glad this is a work of fiction. But just imagine what it must be like to have the author as your English (or German) professor? Listening to him blowing on for hours at a time in the lecture hall would be a death sentence. I can just see all his students mummified in their chairs by listening to him dryly lecture about proper grammar – not even giving off a smell for lack of any moisture remaining in their dusty corpses due to him blowing on endlessly…

Interesting

Particularly interesting storytelling and the narration serves the story well. Enjoyed the insights into the protagonist and the way in which his story is revealed.

A Novel of Memory

Reading W.G. Sebald takes some getting used to. Like many of his stories, "Austerlitz" focuses on memory, and how what we remember influences the way we live our lives. Further, the integration of facts, data, images, and other items generally associated with nonfiction makes a Sebald novel in some ways closer to an essay. The performance was strong, capturing the detachment of both the narrator and the main character. I recommended out.

Moving story extremely well narrated

This is a moving story of a man who was brought as a child to the UK researching the past and the fate of his parents. The novel is very well written, literal and beautiful in its details. The weakest part is the end, which is too abrupt. The narration is outstanding.

Sobering

There is always more to learn about World War II. Millions of people were killed innocently. Each one had a voice, a heart, a story, a legacy. This is the story of one who had to search to remember what happened during his childhood during during World War II. My heart broke anew. Powerful. Sobering.

Subtle slowly evolving personal history

The narrator was superb and the story intriguing. I am going to check out the narrator for other selections.

Masterful!

An enthralling performance of one of the most moving, unusual and inegmatic works of fiction I have ever read.

I suspect Sebald himself would have been pleased with the reader's rendition of his work. Hauntingly beautiful!

A book rich in imagery

A travelogue of a search for one’s mother and father that bears listening to and reading, as both methods of taking in the contents of a book have pluses and minuses. The book is a pleasure of description.

For those of us who don’t speak French

When crucial segments of the narrative are in French…a translation should be mandatory!
I haven’t a clue as to several crucial passages that obviously were important .