Sebald's last work
SEBALD, W.G. Austerlitz. London: Hamish Hamilton. 2001.
8vo. Original brown cloth-backed boards with gilt lettering to spine and publisher’s device; illustrated dust jacket; pp. 414, [2]; minor crease to top left corner of rear panel of dust jacket; otherwise a fine copy.
First UK edition.
Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz, takes the form of a fictionalised biography centred on Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian haunted by the suppressed memories of his early life as a Jewish child evacuated from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and a survivor of the Holocaust. Deprived of the reality of his own origins, Austerlitz undertakes a haunting search to reconstruct his past and recover what remains of his lost identity – tracing, through fragments and echoes, the fragile boundaries between memory, history, and loss.
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