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For the first 100 pages or so, I was truly captivated by this book. Sebald's classic prose - as delightfully polished and musical as one could wish (I read the German version) - was a wonderful match for the rarefied, slightly claustrophobic atmosphere of the Belgian and Irish settings in which the story initially unfolds. But once the narration moves to more familiar locales (London, Prague, Paris) and we become more accustomed to the introspective and neurotic mindscape of the protagonist, the book loses steam.

Given the conditions in which Austerlitz was raised, the neurosis and the pain of uprootment are understandable enough. But even then I found it quite difficult to come to terms with the main character. His persona remains a shadowy, two-dimensional template, driven by self-pity, narcism and a self-serving stance towards the outside world. By the end of the book, the interminable sequence of dreams, revelations, black outs and convulsions to which Austerlitz has been subjected as he retraces his past, has merely started to annoy and the whole literary edifice unravels.

Sebald is at his best when carefully sketching a vignette, conjuring up the dense atmosphere of a particular locale in just a few pages. The visit to the Breendonk fort, the Theresienstad sojourn and the intermezzo at the Fitzpatrick house are wonderful examples of this craft. But judging from this novel, developing a resilient plot that is driven by a multitude of complex characters (not by just one, clumsily digging deeper and deeper in his troubled psyche) is not Sebald's forte. And although the author showers us with factoids and bits of theory from cultural history, with all due respect I'm not convinced he is a strong conceptual thinker either (an impression that has been confirmed by reading his "Natural History of Destruction"). There is simply not enough meat to what seems disjointed and gratuitous theorising about bourgeois architecture, botany, entomology, the nature of time and so forth (Thomas Mann, for example, was much stronger in weaving these essayistic excursions into the fabric of his novels).

I'm not denying Sebald's literary genius. He would have been a great writer of short stories. But I think he overstretched in a novel of the scale of "Austerlitz".