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At first sight, this book seems like an endless succession of distant observations, a long chain of purely visual descriptions by the author himself (at least if we assume the narrator is Sebald) and especially by his somewhat mysterious friend Jacques Austerlitz. I know this does not seem very attractive, and it is also strengthened by the monotonous and slow narrative style that is sustained throughout the story. I can understand that many people slam this book after a number of pages.

But at the same time the narrative style is just what makes it stand out! You can compare it with the style of Marcel Proust: long meandering sentences with an accumulation of details and also very visually descriptive. As in his previous novels Sebald has inserted dozens of rather vague, black and white photographs to emphasize the realistic nature of the narrative, but with the paradoxal effect that they add uncertainty. And then there’s the continuous use of the indirect speech: on almost every page Sebald mentions "said Austerlitz", and in the second third of the book there even is a double indirect speech, "said Vera, said Austerlitz" , as he recounts what Austerlitz� former nanny has told Austerlitz about his past. This repeated indirect speech strengthens the mesmerizing, hypnotic effect of the story, as if you were walking in the dead of the night, before sunrise, in a half waking state of mind. I suspect that Sebald thus consciously intended to reach the effect of timelessness.

And this brings us to the meta-fictional layer of this book: to me, it is essentially about time, and how we as individuals are in or out of time, are struggling with time, not getting a grip on it and also not able to get away from it. That, in a nutshell is the tragedy of the story of Jacques Austerlitz: this isolated, hyper introverted man, the observer of the outside of things (in the beginning of the book he talks incessantly about the architecture and construction history of what he sees around him), this man initially seems to live outside of time; but through his prolonged narrative he shows that � to his horror � he has discovered that he is inextricably linked to a very grave episode of human history, namely the Holocaust. This discovery is recounted through a process of slowly scraping his memory, like an archaeologist does, until he comes to the point where he is confronted with what he apparently has suppressed all his life (so there is quite a lot of Freud in this book too).

Downright masterful it is, the way Sebald brings this story. The timelessness that is suggested by the writing style culminates in one long sentence of nine pages, in which the inhuman machinery of the concentration camp/ghetto Theresienstadt is brought to life, seemingly contained and detached but gruesome to the bone.

“Austerlitz� for me definitely is one of the masterpieces of recent literature, although you'ld better read it when you are in a contemplative state of mind. It is truly tragic that W. G. Sebald was killed in a traffic accident a few months after finishing this book.

PS. It’s a bonus for the Flemish/Belgian reader that the book begins and ends in the Central Station of Antwerp and the Nazi prison camp of Breendonk, which also illustrates the ingenious mirror game that Sebald has included in this story.