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The beauty of Austerlitz (2001) is so intense that I had to take breaks while reading it. It was not difficult because almost all the suspense had been killed for me by the thorough summary of the plotline in the introduction by James Wood. Reading prefaces is risky, as it seems. I realize that the plot is not the core of this book but it felt awkward to know exactly what was going to happen. Besides, I would have preferred to compare my own interpretations to James Wood’s, not having his ideas imprinted in my mind from page one.

At first sight, Austerlitz is a story of a man who looks for traces of his lost family and struggles to reconstruct his past. I think it would be easier to enumerate the things this book is not than enlist what it is: a Holocaust testimony, a philosophical treaty on time, an essay on architecture, language, photography, nature and travelling, a fictional biography, a psychological study, a Bildungsroman, a historical fiction, an adoption story, to name just a few. The way the photos converse with the text is astonishing and the fact that they are fictional makes me admire W.G. Sebald’s creativity even more.

As for the protagonist’s surname, I agree with James Wood’s analysis (the battle of Austerlitz --> Auschwitz) but I also thought the fact that Jacques's family name begins with an A and ends with a Z might suggest that the character’s experiences are a summa of many, many others. Austerlitz is akin to Everyman.

When I was reading this novel, I could not stop thinking about the medieval legend of Jew the Eternal Wanderer. Jacques Austerlitz reminded me of the wandering Jew but contrary to Ahasver he was completely innocent. Never at home, always a lonely stranger and foreigner, constantly on the road... On the railroad, to be exact.

The book was so powerful that I expected a more impressive ending. Besides, the credibility of some events felt questionable � I mean the accidental meetings all over Europe. Notwithstanding, this book blew me away. As usual, there is some cost to it. Everything I am reading at the moment seems so bland, so lacklustre compared to Austerlitz.

For me, Austerlitz is the quintessence of my ideal book. An intellectual adventure and an emotional earthquake at the same time. I adore the author's sublime and unobtrusive use of symbols, especially water. The clarity and elegance of his writing style, particularly while discussing complex philosophical topics like the perception of time, were breathtaking also.

W.G. Sebald makes me like the things I usually hate, for instance, battle scenes. The reason why I detest them is not only violence but also my traumatic memories from Tolstoy's War and Peace: the military descriptions there were torturous. But the battle scene à la Sebald was riveting. And his nature descriptions, especially the ones starring light! Just an example: On bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a lustre lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely—I remember this well—it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity. How I wish I could seep into this landscape and dissolve in it. A lustre lay covers not only Barmouth Bay but Austerlitz too. Immersion in this glow, an iridescent veil of pale, cloudy milkiness, is one of the most stunning things that have happened to me lately.


Landscape with a Wanderer by Eugeniusz Żak, 1916.