I first read this in my final year of college in a German literature course with Katja Garloff, where it completely blew my mind, and then again during my first semester of graduate school in a course with Eric Santner specifically about Sebald. I’ve been wanting to revisit it (this delightful essay by Lauren Oyler was added incentive), and was very curious how it would hold up; if it would still seem astonishing and uncanny. The device of including photographs in a novel, for instance, is not as mind-blowing as it was in the early 2000s, and I wondered if other aspects would likewise have lost their edge, so to speak.
A quick sidenote — I also found myself thinking about how one of the things that college classes do is introduce you to books like this (something Ignacio Sánchez Prado mentions in this eloquent recent essay on the humanities). Indie booksellers do this too — something that academics fail to sufficiently appreciate, I think — but college professors have a little more power to actually make people read such books, as well as having the opportunity to provide a little guidance in how to do so. Reviewers and critics also play this guiding role, to some extent, but again, they’re serving an audience that’s already inclined in this direction.
Anyways. Austerlitz does hold up! It’s not an easy read — the sentences are so. long. — but it remains mesmerizing, and really powerful in the way it evokes an enormity through attention to minutia. It presents a world saturated by history, traced in millions of tiny associations, amassing into a dizzying accumulation (not a totality) that is overwhelming, almost unbearable. The past is somehow both insistently present and also lost forever, unrecoverable. The book is profoundly melancholic and yet tinged with a kind of wonder. The details are fascinating, and one of the pleasures of the book is following one of the strands on your own (I spent a pleasurable hour learning more about Wittgenstein’s visit to Ithaca, for example). This remains potent, though you might expect its pleasure to pall in the age of the internet.
And perhaps this is what is so remarkable about the book; is that it seemingly anticipates many features of our present moment (especially auto-fiction and information overload), but it registers as strikingly original and unique, even now. Even though it speaks to the present, you feel quite distinctly that this novel is 20+ years old. Which is really interesting, and something I’d want to think more about, if I weren’t in the middle of packing a house for a move next week…
Kasia Reads 