What I Read in 2024: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
What is there to say about Austerlitz that hasn’t already been said? This is the third Sebald novel that I’ve read and probably my favorite, though of course it’s not even worth comparing them, since each one is so unique despite the common style — those long sentences, those unbroken paragraphs, that careful piling of specific detail that leaves you almost overwhelmed. The experience of reading Austerlitz is like nothing else — even as you feel confused about what exactly is going on and where exactly this novel is going, since you know it’s not going in a conventional direction, you are riveted by the complex layering of detail upon detail, and the way the sentences unfold like a train pulling into a station, to use an appropriate metaphor.
On its surface, Austerlitz is Sebald’s most accessible novel — we follow our observer-narrator as he encounters the novel’s protagonist Jacques Austerlitz at different times and in different places and slowly learns the story of his life. As with Sebald’s other novel The Emigrants, the ultimate revelation has to do with the Holocaust and its lingering impact on the subsequent European generation. But of course, one does not read Austerlitz for the story. Instead, it’s the experience of Sebald’s prose style that makes the novel so compelling.
The best way to demonstrate this is to take an exemplary passage. In the following scene, Austerlitz is describing a moment during his youth in Wales when he looked out the window at the Irish Sea:
How often I stood by the open window, unable to think coherently in the face of this spectacle, which was never the same twice. In the morning you saw the shadowy half of the world outside, the gray of the air lying in layers above the water. In the afternoon cumulus clouds often rose on the southwest horizon, their snow-white slopes and steep precipices displacing one another, towering above each other, reaching higher and higher, as high, Gerald once commented, said Austerlitz, as the peaks of the Andes or the Karakorum mountains. Or you might see rain falling in the distance, drawn inland from the sea like heavy curtains drawn in a theater, and on autumn evenings mist would roll on to the beach, accumulating by the mountainsides and forcing its way up the valley. But on bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a luster lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colors were dissolved in a pearl-gray haze; there were no contrasts, no shading anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely — I remember this well — it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.
In these six sentences, you have a microcosm of Sebald’s power as a writer. First, we have physical and sensory descriptions of the view in the morning “the gray of the air lying in layers above the water,” an image evocative for its specificity. Then, in describing the afternoon, the prose starts to shift, and the sentences become longer, with a series of escalating modifiers and clauses, a description of the clouds as “snow-white slopes…displacing one another” that culminates in an unexpected comparison to the Andes and the Karakorum mountains — taking us suddenly from Wales to a different part of the world. But the images don’t end here, and Sebald continues the description with another long sentence describing the rain and then a contrasting description on a summer day in which “all forms and colors were dissolved” that concludes with a moving reflection on eternity — ultimately giving this long passage a clear purpose. It’s not simply a description of an evocative vision, not simply a passage of sensory detail, but sensory detail building to a climactic psychological understanding that justifies the inclusion of every line and every clause. It’s the kind of writing that, despite its length, never feels overwritten, partly because every detail is distinct, but also because, as is true of the novel as a whole, we trust that there is a purpose to all this, that all these confessions and revelations, this long story Austerlitz is telling us, the carefully detailed and evocative scenes Sebald slowly builds, that all of it is ultimately leading to something profound.
