Word: sebaldã
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...truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” Transcending these images is a dangerous prospect. By staring beyond the stills of history, we risk destabilising not only our ideas about the past but also our own place within that narrative. Despite this, W.G. Sebald??s “Austerlitz” stages such a staring contest, in which we—along with the protagonist—are challenged not to look away when those images dissolve, as devastating as the truth might turn...
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...
...Sebald??s response to this philosophical proposition is at once local, in telling the story of one man’s struggle to prevent his own history from “lapsing into oblivion,” and metaphysical, in challenging our assumptions about the linear nature of time. Perhaps, says Austerlitz, “all the moments of time have co-existed simultaneously… past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them...
From the moment we learn that Austerlitz was evacuated to England, the Holocaust haunts almost every page of the novel, but the novel never lapses into hysteria. This is partly attributable to Sebald??s deliberate prose style—described by critic James Wood as “densely agitated”—which renders even the most psychologically disordered states with forensic lucidity: “reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement...
...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’s apprehension of the inevitable obliteration of all things by time. But it is more certainly his masterpiece...