paperback, 432 pages
Published July 21, 2002 by Gardners Books.
It's been decades since I read the book. I remember that I found the content boring, but Sebald's language was beautiful. The way he connected sentences. I remember one sentence being longer than a single page. I've no idea about the translation, I read it in german. Schöne Sprachpoesie.
Memory as dreamscape, memory as assemblage, memory as history, memory as identity. Sebald's prose is a seductive and occasionally manic descent into the interior canals of what makes us who we are as we interact with the world around us, whether those are even separable. When a writer slows down his prose, and Sebald slows waaaay down, often the effect is to infuse the object of their focus with emotion. No one but James Agee demonstrates this writing mechanic to such a degree. Like the description of items in a holocaust museum, Sebald paints his emotional through line in the refractions of light bouncing off the ordinary materials of daily life.
This is a powerful and poetic book and like no other I've read. It has the audacity to stay true to its artistic project and the writing mastery to pull it off.
Some day, soon, there will be no one alive who lived through WWII. No one alive who will wish to forget... No one alive who will strive to remember. No one alive who witnessed with their own eyes the things that happened, every day, all around them. To them. To people they knew. But no matter, all of Europe is forever haunted and tainted by what happened there. The nightmare of being forced out of ones home, the horror of marching feet and falling bombs, the shame of the depths of depravity that mankind sank to can not be hidden or forgotten or somehow made to seem not as bad as it really was because we all know it was worse than most dare to remember.
This was a weird book that set your mind adrift in various conflicting currents. One stream was memory, the failure of memory in various …
Some day, soon, there will be no one alive who lived through WWII. No one alive who will wish to forget... No one alive who will strive to remember. No one alive who witnessed with their own eyes the things that happened, every day, all around them. To them. To people they knew. But no matter, all of Europe is forever haunted and tainted by what happened there. The nightmare of being forced out of ones home, the horror of marching feet and falling bombs, the shame of the depths of depravity that mankind sank to can not be hidden or forgotten or somehow made to seem not as bad as it really was because we all know it was worse than most dare to remember.
This was a weird book that set your mind adrift in various conflicting currents. One stream was memory, the failure of memory in various ways... To protect, to hide. The power of memory, the ephemeral quality. Another stream carried my mind to hauntings both personal and national, conscious, subconscious. Another was the saying "if theses walls could talk..." So many events of the past reverberate through the ether, sink into the wood work, hide behind the walls. You can tear down, rebuild, pave over but the ghosts remain. And yet another stream calls to mind the events, people, homes, loved ones, pets, forever frozen in photographs... alive, happy, unaware of the future. The memories these pictures call forth. Are we really remembering the events or do we just remember the picture itself?
The main character of this story Austerlitz, finds out, when he is in his early teens, that he is not who he thought he was but was actually born to other people in another country. His parents were not really his parents but were merely caretakers. It was like he was yanked out of his current life but never was replaced again in his proper life. He couldn't because of the ravages of WWII in Europe in general and upon the Jews in particular. When I was 6 years old my mother died suddenly one night. I went to bed the night before as one person living her carefree little girl life, but the next morning I awoke into a new life. Somehow in the middle of the night I became someone else, forced into a different life. I remember very little of that time. Like Austerlitz, many of my memories are hidden from me, stored away in a dark closet on a high shelf in a box tucked way in the back. I was young; it is hard to formulate memories when everything is so confusing and happening so fast. One thing I do remember clearly is a feeling of desperately wanting to "go home" to go back to that place where things were still normal, where things felt right, where my mom was still in the kitchen, where I was still me. But I never could feel right no matter where I was, no matter if my family was all around me. Life went on as normal for everyone else, outside of my immediate family, but I was yanked out of one life and thrown into another. That's another stream this book sent me sailing down. The feeling of not feeling right in your own life.
This book gives you a lot to contemplate, forces you to ruminate, shines a light into dark corners. Maybe this book deserves 5 stars. I don't know. It's too soon to tell. I feel too weird.
Subtle. Melancholic. Haunting. Probably my favorite Sebald.
