Uncorrected Signed Proof of Sebald's last work
SEBALD, W.G. [trans. Anthea Bell]. Austerlitz. New York: Random House. 2001.
8vo. Original printed blue and white decorative wrappers; pp. [vi], 298, [2]; fine.
Advance Uncorrected Proof signed by the author. Includes three loosely inserted documents, two sent from Kimberly Burns, publicity manager at Random House, in which she introduces the novel and announces its release date. The third document is an 'Advance Praise' advertisement featuring glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reveiws.
"In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another?".
Sebald's final novel before his tragic death, Austerlitz, is relayed in the form of a fictionalised biography and therefore orientates itself on the life of an architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz, haunted by his repressed childhood as a Jew who was evacuated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Deprived of the reality of his own story, Austerlitz seeks to uncover the truth about his life and piece together the past beyond what remains at present - merely the echoes.
To quote the legendary Susan Sontag, "Is literary greatness still possibe? What would a noble literary enterprise look like now? One of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W.G Sebald".
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