SEBALD, W.G. [trans. Anthea Bell] Austerlitz London, Hamish Hamilton, 2001
8vo. Original brown cloth bound boards with gilt lettering to spine and publisher's device; illustrated dust jacket; pp. [6] 7-395 [2] 398-414 [11]; minor crease in top left of rear dust jacket; otherwise fine copy.
"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 avaliable to English-language redeaers is the work of W.G Sebald".
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