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W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz is an austere but beautiful narrative within a narrative about identity and loss with the Holocaust as a looming backdrop. The narrator (unnamed) records conversations with Joseph (Jacques) Austerlitz whom he meets a few times by chance and later at the whim of Austerlitz. This secondary narrator talks about his life before discovering his origins and the incredible quest across the Czech Republic, Germany, and France to find memories of his mother and father. There were moments that were soul-crushing but also moments of great Proustian beauty. Containing no chapters or paragraph indentations and just three breaks that I recall demarcated by asterisks, it is hard to interrupt oneself during reading it.
A few quotes I enjoyed:
"...they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expressions as the creatures in the zoo." Page 6
"...we even seemed to hear the heavy calvary clashing, and felt (like a weakness sensed in our own bodies) whole ranks of men collapsing beneath the surge of oncoming force." Page 100
"In doing this job, which in its pointlessness reminded me of the eternal punishments that we are told...we must endure after death..." Page 188
"...I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something different, something inexpressible because we have no word for it, just as I had no words when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand." Page 193-4
"At some point in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life." Page 298
"...I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and a absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed must ultimately coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability." Page 393
"Jacobson writes that it was truly terrifying to see such emptiness open up a foot away from firm ground, to realize that there was no transition, only this dividing line, with ordinary life on one side and its unimaginable opposite on the other." Page 414

Reading the text in Austerlitz and seeing the photos are haunting, but necessary to fully appreciate the beauty and pathos of this essential work about the 20th C'a greatest catastrophe.