Austerlitz
Ratings15
Average rating4.5
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.
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Wow, powerful. Reading this in 2020 America I can't help but draw comparisons to our current reality both in the USA and elsewhere. Oppression, repression, violent subjugation, and so on of the other - the not us. This book reveals one German's attempt to understand his country's history and legacy but then becomes a rumination on what allows these things to happen in the first place.
For the first third of this book I remember thinking ‘if I wanted to read meandering prose, I would have re-read Proust', and for the last third: ‘... and now? this seems anticlimactic', but that middle third is harrowing and haunting. This chilling description of the walk to the meeting point will stay with me:
The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning.
Ultimately you realize how it all fits together. Masterful.
