"W. G. Sebald is a monster -- a gorgeous and unwaveringly assured writer, a bold formal innovator, and a man always plunging into the core of identity, singular and national. In
Austerlitz
,
he's created his richest and most emotionally devastating story, and this book might be his finest."
- Dave Eggers, "who has no right to be commenting on this man."
"With untraceable swiftness and assurance, W. G. Sebald's writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circumstances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus, the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that make his books, one by one, indispensable. He evokes at once the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the inconsolable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment and its ground of memory. Each book seems to be something that surely was impossible, and each (upon every re-reading) is unique and astonishing."
- W. S. Merwin
Over the course of a 30-year conversation that unfolds across Europe, W. G. Sebald's unnamed narrator listens as Jacques Austerlitz relates his extraordinary life story. A refugee who immigrated alone to England in the summer of 1939 to be raised by a Welsh couple as their own, Austerlitz remembers nothing of his real family, but as he grows older the specter of the catastrophe that befell them casts an ever-longer shadow over his mind. When, like water from a dam giving way, fleeting childhood memories flood into view, he follows their trail back over time and space to the dark heart of twentieth-century Europe.
With this work of devastating beauty and pathos, W. G. Sebald has found a way to understand and express in human terms the previously unimaginable.