Austerlitz

Mix architecture and a child looking for his heritage and you have Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. The protagonist in this novel is Jacques Austerlitz while the man he befriends is the author who has a series of interactions throughout the book.  Austerlitz learns during his mid adult age that he actually was adopted and strains to remember the various pictures he has from his past, learning that he in fact was not Dafydd Elias, whom he had grown up as in his early life at school, though he does have some memory of life before age 5.  The author is enamored with architecture and brings us through a series of places and structures (my own editorial note, you gotta get a glimpse of some of the pictures, seemed as some rather interesting choices, realistic and didn’t always fit my thoughts on the story).  We learn Austerlitz was transported from Czechoslovakia which was being threatened by Hitler’s regime at the time.  We travel with Austerlitz as he begins to put the puzzle pieces together of his youth from Prague to Theriesenstadt (a camp “ghetto for Jews”) to present day Paris. The narrator and Austerlitz discuss the role of the records from the Hitler regime, records stored in the various libraries in France that help him tell his story.  We as the reader are brought into the missing abyss of Austerlitz life piecing together the structure of his life with the structures of the physical pieces during the World War in Europe.  An unsettling and almost unfinished book in that it left me thinking about how images and structures are sometimes the things that bring back our feelings and memories.  The structure of the book is quite inventive, no chapter breaks and a few really long passages with seemingly no pauses in writing.  Again, the pictures are eerie in the day of Austerlitz's upbringing mixed with 1970s black and white contemporary (for its time) pics of the area.  For those who like historical and psychological metamorphosis-type books, read it.  The writing is quite good.