Book summary

The narrator of Sebald's fourth novel meets Jacques Austerlitz in a railroad station, and from there their friendship continues, revolving around a series of conversations, ostensibly about architecture but soon expanding to include the details of Austerlitz's life. The narrator learns that he was separated from his true parents at the age of 5, when they were killed in the Holocaust, and raised in Wales with no knowledge of his past--a personal history he unraveled much later in life. The story is illustrated mysteriously with photographs of buildings and people. A New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2001.

Media reviews

"The slippage of memory has been the great preoccupation of [Sebald's] work, and with his remarkable new novel, AUSTERLITZ, the struggle to rectify that slippage becomes something more--a guiding principle, and perhaps the only recognizable substance, of our lives. As in his other work, Sebald never states this point outright....Instead, he elicits it elliptically, in a long series of stories that overlap each other, unexpectedly switch back and turn in on themselves....At the end of this dilatory, elaborately structured and evocative novel, then, we have forgotten altogether our original readerly suspicions about the reality of Austerlitz's story, and taken up the far more unsettling questions that it poses about the reality of our own."