I am almost exactly in the middle of reading Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. It is about a man, displaced by the Second World War, whose past is revealed to him in fragments as he wanders, thinking about the history of architecture and civilization. I haven’t got to the revelations yet but this arc is described on the book jacket and is adequately set up in the beginning of the book.
The narrative itself wanders and it is sometimes hard for me to remember what I last read when I pick up the book again. The style of writing emulates the both the physical wandering of the character, Jacques Austerlitz, and the diffuse wandering structure of his thoughts as he relates them to the narrator. There are two voices in this book: the third person Austerlitz speaks through an un-named first person (Sebald himself perhaps) who is telling the story, and who repeats them without adding more than his own reactions. I have yet to work out what his part will be in the arc of the book; at the moment, he seems to be a device to make Austerlitz more removed and cryptic, filtered and edited as he is through another’s interpretation.
The story, if that indeed is what it is, is a series of impressions and explanations; "a kind of meditative interior monologue." Austerlitz, retired from his teaching position, appears to be wandering, as a kind of flâneur, except that there is nothing idle about him or any suggestion that he is doing anything for the sake of a detached and indolent pleasure-seeking. Rather, he seems restlessly driven by what is not accessible in himself and a need to make sense of the world. He is not detached, he is isolated by the rift in his own history. I know generally where the book is going (in fact that is the reason why I picked it up) but I find that I have only the sketchiest sense of all that went before the part that I am reading, in the same way that one remembers only the barest skeleton of the thoughts of a week ago. I feel embedded in an all-encompassing present, where anything before now is a dubious proposition and where the uncontrollable future could go anywhere or nowhere.
This is an intensely visual book: a lot of the text is explanation of the appearance of the places that Austerlitz travels through. There are images dotted through the text, which are themselves a collection of fragments that reinforce the passage where they appear, although they are without captions that would document them as any kind of corroborating “evidence”. Most of them are photographs and I find myself wondering if Sebald collected them from left behind albums, flea-market stalls and newspaper clippings, stuffing them into a file until the time when he tipped them all out and started configuring them in groups to begin his tale. This visuality is signaled in the first chapter by four tightly cropped pairs of eyes, those of a bush-baby, an owl, and two middle-aged male humans who, with the suggestion in the text that they are painters or philosophers, I feel I recognize but can’t place.
I have just read a section where Austerlitz, through the narrator, has described the area of London around Liverpool Street Station and just like Grass, in The Flounder, he never places it in any one time but layers one over another by describing the archeological excavation of a section of once marshland that was later the bleaching fields for weavers and then the burial grounds for paupers, later to become the foundations for one of the great cathedral stations of the Victorian railway system. This interests me: the shared desire to fix human existence in its trace on the physical surfaces of place.
It is unsurprising that Austerlitz’ life’s work has been engaged in writing for a book on architecture and civilization, whose fragments never resolve themselves, perhaps because they revolve around the void in his own history (and that of twentieth-century Europe) that, in as far as I have read, he is yet to resolve.