Austerlitz

Austerlitz bored me. While Sebald had the ingredients to produce a great novel, the meditative pacing made reading this a slog. For a book about place and memory, it’s hardly memorable and will not stay in place on my bookshelf. 

In short, the story follows an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary Jacques Austerlitz in Antwerp during the 1960s. Through their conversations, we come to understand Austerlitz’s history. As a young boy, his parents sent him from Czechoslovakia to the UK in 1939 to escape Hitler’s sweep across Europe. He grows up with no recollection of his past. Only after his foster parents die does he begin to uncover it, piecing together fragments through visits to places that seem to awaken buried memory.

Sebald best conveys the central theme of memory in this passage:

I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. 

Yet time, more than memory, emerges as the novel’s most interesting theme. Early on, the narrator questions its nature:

If Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? 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 another?

And in the final third, he edges toward something like eternalism:

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form ot stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their fields of vision. 

And in the last third of the novel, he appears to embrace eternalism:

Or I felt, as I was saying, said Austerlitz, as if my father were still in Paris and just waiting, so to speak, for a good opportunity to reveal himself. Such ideas infallibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them than the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to fund our way to them at last, just when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

Sebald implies a profound metaphysical claim: that time is not a river but a landscape. That past and future coexist, and we wander through them, sometimes stumbling into rooms we once inhabited and meeting people we once knew.