Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Because Sebald’s books are such artful puzzles, I couldn’t sleep after I finished this last night. My brain whirred and whirred, trying to make sense of what I’d just read. So much of his (Sebald’s) technique is about playing with the things he knows his readers would usually expect to be staring up at them from the page while he deliberately avoids placing them there on paper to be found. Consequently, Austerlitz, like The Rings of Saturn before it, is a work of minimalism which always skirts around the edges of its own dark heart, and because of this peculiar evasiveness, its emotions initially come over muted, with multiple layers of framing keeping the reader at a distance, rendering the narrative (for the most part) purposely cerebral rather than visceral. Ultimately, however, distance is the very thing that makes Austerlitz the moving and memorable book that it is, and its strange magnitude originates from the fact that what Sebald doesn’t write about is far more important than what he does.

As James Wood points out in his annoyingly brilliant introduction (which you’d better be sure not to read until you’ve finished), there is one word in particular that Sebald avoids throughout, even though it is the single word most central to what his book is trying to comprehend. This elusive word is very nearly the same word as the title of the book itself and it flickers up at the reader through the fog of almost every page. We should know what it is without being told. It’s a horror that Sebald’s writing orbits but purposely never enters: the black hole at the centre of history whose horizon conceals a void that defies contemplation. It is as though Sebald’s gaze has been determinedly angled slightly off to one side, away from the glaring eyes of the past, only daring to sense the magnitude of The Holocaust by the proximity of its gravity. And so, in this curiously askew way, Austerlitz becomes the most haunting expression I’ve yet come across of someone trying to process the anti-humanist bleakness of Nazi Germany. Here, in his last book, then, Sebald has finally moved beyond the cold and silent rubble of Saturn’s rings (mausoleums to long since disintegrated alien moons). He now navigates a deeper region of space, one more inhospitable and violent: the accretion disc of Sagittarius A*, perhaps. A white-hot outskirt encircling an immense abyss.

On a personal note, I felt connected to Austerlitz via two distinct channels. The first of which, rather trivially, comes from the fact that, so it turns out, my mum and her long-time bestie (who both studied languages at the University of East Anglia in the early 1980s) remember “Max Sebald� as one of their lecturers. They recall a “quiet and insular� man and were upset when they heard of his premature death 22 years ago. This is a tenuous link but it humanises him a little bit for me, and adds to his book’s strange mystique.

The second link, if you’ll permit me some indulgence, comes from my family’s own connection with the Kindertransport. My great-grandfather, who worked for the film industry in the cinemas of Birmingham in the 1930s, became (as I understand it) involved in the Kindertransport effort via his work colleagues. And so, in 1938, in the months before Kristallnacht, he and my great-grandmother agreed to look after a 9-year-old Jewish girl called Trudy, the daughter of another employee of the same industry � a man based in Vienna. When Tudy arrived in England, my grandfather, John, would have been 4 years old. “Johnpa� grew up with Trudy, living with her initially in Birmingham, then at the beach-side hotel (The Cary Arms, in Babbacombe, Torquay, Devon) that my great-grandparents ran from 1941 onwards, once they’d moved the family away from Birmingham soon after the outbreak of war � an attempt to find the family a place of greater safety clear of the city’s nightly bombardment.



Johnpa always, I think, thought of Trudy as his older sibling, and I picture them playing on the shingle of Babbacombe Beach amongst the American soldiers who frequently used the hotel during the war years, and who came to the area for training all through the run-up to the Normandy Landings. Eventually, word came that Trudy’s parents had escaped Vienna and made it to New York, and so, after five years in England, she took the boat across the Atlantic, arriving under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty at Ellis Island, before going on to live an archetypically 20th-century American life.



Trudy and Johnpa remained in contact until the very end (although, in their later years, when I asked, neither of them seemed entirely certain of the dates and details of their war stories). When she , age 92, in 2021, he was too ill to travel across the Atlantic for her stone setting, so my parents went in his place. At the ceremony, my mum was startled by the gratitude of Trudy’s extended family: “The only reason we’re here�, someone said to her, “is because of people like your grandparents�. Some eighty years after the fact, my mum felt a bit fraudulent accepting this praise, I think.

Johnpa, who, with my grandmother, returned to Babbacombe to live out his later years, passed away a few months ago, age 89, and with him went one more small, hazy link to the ever-receding past � history which year by year erodes into time’s ocean together with the crumbling Red Sandstone cliffs of Babbacombe Bay.



Indeed, the story I’ve just told isn’t really my story to tell, and many of the images I have of it are concoctions of my own mind, swimming in and out of focus depending on where the facts fit. Like I say, I’m convinced that Trudy and Johnpa spent a lot of time playing with American soldiers on Babbacombe beach in the months before D-Day � I’ve always imagined this to be so � but the dates don’t actually match: Trudy must have arrived in England in early 1938 and then stayed for no more than five years. The Normandy Landings didn’t take place until June 1944. She would have been gone, therefore, well before Johnpa was catering for the Americans at his father’s hotel. Sebald is always playing with this strange false recollection effect in his writing, showing us images which don’t quite add up, and reciting (supposedly from memory) a whole book’s-worth of dialogue he shared with someone many years ago. It would seem that, no matter how much we’d like it to, the glove doesn’t quite fit his story, just as it doesn’t quite fit mine. It is possible that our memories and our histories are mostly composed of lies, but what else do we have but the inventions of our minds and the fragments of a few faded photographs? � it is in this indistinct way that we find ourselves looking back at the past:

“All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer boy, the infantryman shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse’s eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with pre-formed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.�

“Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point?� � these are questions the narrator asks the reader right in the middle of The Rings of Saturn. From what I’ve read, I think they’re probably the two questions most central to Sebald’s work (being a writer, as he was, mostly beaten into a sad listlessness by history’s unceasing insistence on the endlessly recurring cycle of man’s inhumanity to man). But, as with many of the things most fundamental to Austerlitz, this time around they are never posed to the reader directly. They, instead, float like ghosts beneath the text’s shrouded surfaces. As a result, this is a book you wish you could reach out and touch even though you know it will always elude your grasp � just like your memories.