Geoff's Reviews > Austerlitz

”It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last… And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?”

I have trouble writing about Sebald. I read The Emigrants and The Rings Of Saturn back-to-back a few years ago, and didn’t bother writing reviews on this site. I just added them to my favorites and gave the requisite 5 stars. Perhaps this silence that comes after reading Sebald is in some ways my attempt to not trivialize or minimize the effect reading his books produces; on the other hand, it might be that Sebald says what needs to be said, in just the way it has to be said; that it is difficult to follow Sebald because there is a certain emotional dusk or twilight that his prose produces that then inevitably calls forth a kind of night- one wants to silently dwell on the words and images, because they seem so fragile, almost sacred. I’m not hyperbolizing this experience. Sebald is, to me, the inheritor and refiner, perhaps the perfector, of not only the whole body of 20th century literature of exile, but also one of the last great rememberers, the conscience that carries the lessons of the disasters of the 20th century. He represents the dying flame of Old World European literary scholars- a Sir Thomas Browne roaming the post-Relativity age. The trance-like or oneiric quality of his prose seems to me the voice of Time, but Time evacuating itself of its properties- time falling into the inner place where it dissolves within ourselves as Memory. His prose captures the essence of experience in the process of always being lost and recovered, the tenses of our lives that are always flickering into substance and de-substantiating before we might grab hold and define them.

This is a personal and a universal achievement. For all of his books are in some way about collective disappearance and the attempts we make, the various means and tactics we as individuals employ, to keep oblivion at bay. They are about how universal experience weaves the fate of the individual (thus the recurring themes of historical consequence, war, colonialism, etc.) In this sense, Austerlitz is a pinnacle of Sebaldean prose, as it directly confronts, through a single person, the universal history of destruction. Its main concern is the possibility of the universal forgetting of the lessons of the Holocaust to the obliterating work of Time and the caprice of Memory within the individual. This book is populated with ghosts, wavering beings, mists, fogs, smoke, things that obscure, grand facades of buildings housing empty labyrinths, vacant wind-sung streets, gloaming forests, cemeteries overgrown with time’s lichen and tendrils, processions of those diminished by death suddenly appearing, glimmering into and retreating out of this world. The prose, of course, wanders, walks, explores- Sebald is pretty much only digression, in all of his books- beautiful, melancholy digression- akin to the process of meditative reflection itself the prose drifts, associates, follows leads down desolate halls, disappears into dusty vaults, peers through windows at empty landscapes in winter light, watches the clouds above silently pass away. But in all of this an utterly human voice is rising and ebbing, revealing, guiding, a tenderness pervades the melancholy (and, to me, the word melancholy almost always implies something achingly beautiful and tender as well as something struck with sadness and loss). A reach for the eternal and Ideal within the irretrievable. So Austerlitz, and Sebald, comes to find that place where hopeless hopes invest the human experience.

But really, this “review” is simply an excuse to provide some links to a few Lieder ohne Worte- throughout my reading of Austerlitz this was the music floating through mind:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR3t6v...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV2LRF...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-n_wb...

and of course

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKtkHh...