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Austerlitz (Modern Library (Paperback))
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About Austerlitz
About the Author W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He has taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, since 1970, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 194 was the first director of the British Center for Literary Translation. His three previous books have won a number of international awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. Product Description This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Review “[A] beautiful novel . . . quietly breathtaking . . . Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue.”—James Wood, from the Introduction “Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art.”—Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review “Sebald is a rare and elusive species . . . but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. . . . He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker “Sebald’s final novel; his masterpiece, and one of the supreme works of art of our time.”—John Banville, The Guardian NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2001 BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES • NEW YORK MAGAZINE • ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize Translator Anthea Bell—Recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Outstanding Translation from German into English Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer's day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name. Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion. I still remember the uncertainty of my footsteps as I walked all round the inner city, down Jeruzalemstraat, Nachtegaalstraat, Pelikaanstraat, Paradijsstraat, Immerseelstraat, and many other streets and alleyways, until at last, plagued by a headache and my uneasy thoughts, I took refuge in the zoo by the Astridplein, next to the Centraal Station, waiting for the pain to subside. I sat there on a bench in dappled shade, beside an aviary full of brightly feathered finches and siskins fluttering about. As the afternoon drew to a close I walked through the park, and finally went to see the Nocturama, which had firs
