Word: austerlitzã
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...uncover his origins and early childhood—a curious void in his memory—after suffering a mental breakdown. His journey leads him to confront the dark heart of European history. In this, his final novel, author W.G. Sebald synthesizes multiple literary genres: “Austerlitz?? is at once autobiography, history, travelogue, and meditation. It’s publication in 2001—mere months before his death in a car accident—echoed the sentiment of closure, or the struggle for some semblance thereof, after a century of bloodshed and horror in Europe...
These meetings, and the scenes of Austerlitz??s story, often take place at twilight, or to use Sebald’s favourite phrase, in “the gathering dusk.” We are reminded of Henry James’s preference for that time in the day when shadows begin to lengthen—what he called “the divine dusk.” But while for James this atmosphere was one in which history glimmered, offering up its inspiration, for Sebald, the impending darkness serves as a metaphor for the inscrutability...
Moreover, the genocide in which we presume Austerlitz??s mother was murdered (this is never stated explicitly) is manifest in the fragments of evidence that Austerlitz finds in archives and books, and in the unattributed photographs that punctuate the pages of the novel. This is clearest towards the book’s end, in an extended description of a film made by the Nazis on the occasion of the Red Cross’s inspection of Theresienstadt in 1944, mendaciously depicting the prisoners of the camp enjoying life in what resembles a holiday resort. Austerlitz slows the film...
Shortly after “Austerlitz?? was published, Sebald died in a car crash, aged 57. At the time, he was tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements, including the meditative travelogue “The Rings of Saturn,” and “The Emigrants,” which tells the story of four individuals who—like Austerlitz??managed to escape the Holocaust but were forever haunted by the fate of those...
...while “Austerlitz?? shares these works’ fixation on uncovering the histories of forgotten people and places, its odyssey is a darker, more troubling one, and its construction more deliberate. The novel is preoccupied with the line that separates being from non-being, a line that blurs and trembles when we realize the contingency of our present existence on the now-invisible events of the past. For this reason, it is tempting to read “Austerlitz?? as Sebald’s swan song, haunted, as it is, by one man?...