{"product_id":"austerlitz-isbn-9780812982619","title":"Austerlitz","description":"\u003cb\u003eW. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s \u003ci\u003eWild Strawberries, \u003c\/i\u003eKafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s \u003ci\u003eRemembrance of Things Past.\u003c\/i\u003e”—Michiko Kakutani, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of\u003ci\u003e The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews \u003c\/i\u003eBest Fiction Book of the Century • A \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNew York \u003c\/i\u003eMagazine Best Book of the Year\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, \u003ci\u003eIndependent \u003c\/i\u003eForeign Fiction Prize, and \u003ci\u003eJewish Quarterly \u003c\/i\u003eWingate Literary Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA small child when he comes to England on a \u003ci\u003eKindertransport\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.“[A] beautiful novel . . . quietly breathtaking . . . Sebald contrives \u003ci\u003enot \u003c\/i\u003eto 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.”\u003cb\u003e—James Wood, from the Introduction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.”\u003cb\u003e—Richard Eder, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“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.”\u003cb\u003e—Anthony Lane, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sebald’s final novel; his masterpiece, and one of the supreme works of art of our time.”\u003cb\u003e—John Banville, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eW. G. Sebald\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books \u003ci\u003eThe Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAusterlitz\u003c\/i\u003e have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. His other books include \u003ci\u003eAfter Nature, Campo Santo,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eOn the Natural History of Destruction\u003c\/i\u003e. He died in December 2001.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 first been opened  only a few months earlier. It  was some time before my eyes became used to its artificial  dusk and I  could make out different animals leading their sombrous lives behind   the glass by the light of a pale moon. I cannot now recall exactly  what creatures  I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but  there were probably bats and jerboas  from Egypt and the Gobi Desert,  native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums,  pine  martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting  back  and forth over the grayish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing  into a bamboo thicket.  The only animal which has remained lingering  in my memory is the raccoon. I watched  it for a long time as it sat  beside a little stream with a serious expression on  its face, washing  the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that  all  this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness,  would help  it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so  to speak, through no fault  of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of  the denizens of the Nocturama is that several  of them had strikingly  large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain  painters  and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds  us  purely by means of looking and thinking. I believe that my mind  also dwelt on the  question of whether the electric light was turned  on for the creatures in the Nocturama  when real night fell and the  zoo was closed to the public, so that as day dawned  over their  topsy-turvy miniature universe they could fall asleep with some  degree  of reassurance. Over the years, images of the interior of the  Nocturama have become  confused in my mind with my memories of the  \u003ci\u003eSalle des pas perdus,\u003c\/i\u003e as it is called,  in Antwerp Centraal Station.  If I try to conjure up a picture of that waiting room  today I  immediately see the Nocturama, and if I think of the Nocturama the  waiting  room springs to my mind, probably because when I left the zoo  that afternoon I went  straight into the station, or rather first  stood in the square outside it for some  time to look up at the façade  of that fantastical building, which I had taken in  only vaguely when  I arrived in the morning. Now, however, I saw how far the station   constructed under the patronage of King Leopold exceeded its purely  utilitarian  function, and I marveled at the verdigris-covered Negro boy who, for a century now,  has sat upon his dromedary on an oriel  turret to the left of the station façade,  a monument to the world of  the animals and native peoples of the African continent,  alone  against the Flemish sky. When I entered the great hall of the  Centraal Station  with its dome arching sixty meters high above it, my  first thought, perhaps triggered  by my visit to the zoo and the sight  of the dromedary, was that this magnificent  although then severely  dilapidated foyer ought to have cages for lions and leopards  let into  its marble niches, and aquaria for sharks, octopuses, and crocodiles,   just as some zoos, conversely, have little railway trains in which  you can, so to  speak, travel to the farthest corners of the earth. It  was probably because of ideas  like these, occurring to me almost of  their own accord there in Antwerp, that the  waiting room which, I  know, has now been turned into a staff canteen struck me as  another  Nocturama, a curious confusion which may of course have been the  result  of the sun’s sinking behind the city rooftops just as I  entered the room. The gleam  of gold and silver on the huge,  half-obscured mirrors on the wall facing the windows  was not yet  entirely extinguished before a subterranean twilight filled the  waiting  room, where a few travelers sat far apart, silent and  motionless. Like the creatures  in the Nocturama, which had included a  strikingly large number of dwarf species—tiny  fennec foxes,  spring-hares, hamsters—the railway passengers seemed to me somehow   miniaturized, whether by the unusual height of the ceiling or because  of the gathering  dusk, and it was this, I suppose, which prompted the  passing thought, nonsensical  in itself, that they were the last  members of a diminutive race which had perished  or had been expelled  from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they  wore the  same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo. One of the  people  waiting in the \u003ci\u003eSalle des pas perdus\u003c\/i\u003e was Austerlitz, a man who  then, in 1967, appeared  almost youthful, with fair, curiously wavy  hair of a kind I had seen elsewhere only  on the German hero Siegfried  in Fritz Lang’s \u003ci\u003eNibelungen\u003c\/i\u003e film. That day in Antwerp,  as on all our  later meetings, Austerlitz wore heavy walking boots and workman’s   trousers made of faded blue calico, together with a tailor-made but  long outdated  suit jacket. Apart from these externals he also  differed from the other travelers  in being the only one who was not  staring apathetically into space, but instead  was occupied in making  notes and sketches obviously relating to the room where we  were both  sitting—a magnificent hall more suitable, to my mind, for a state  ceremony  than as a place to wait for the next connection to Paris or  Oostende—for when he  was not actually writing something down his  glance often dwelt on the row of windows,  the fluted pilasters, and  other structural details of the waiting room. Once Austerlitz  took a  camera out of his rucksack, an old Ensign with telescopic bellows,  and took  several pictures of the mirrors, which were now quite dark,  but so far I have been  unable to find them among the many hundreds of  pictures, most of them unsorted,  that he entrusted to me soon after  we met again in the winter of 1996. When I finally  went over to  Austerlitz with a question about his obvious interest in the waiting   room, he was not at all surprised by my direct approach but answered  me at once,  without the slightest hesitation, as I have variously  found since that solitary  travelers, who so often pass days on end in  uninterrupted silence, are glad to be  spoken to. Now and then they  are even ready to open up to a stranger unreservedly  on such  occasions, although that was not the case with Austerlitz in the  \u003ci\u003eSalle  des pas perdus,\u003c\/i\u003e nor did he subsequently tell me very much about  his origins and  his own life. Our Antwerp conversations, as he  sometimes called them later, turned  primarily on architectural  history, in accordance with his own astonishing professional   expertise, and it was the subject we discussed that evening as we sat  together  until nearly midnight in the restaurant facing the waiting  room on the other side  of the great domed hall. The few guests still  lingering at that late hour one by  one deserted the buffet, which was  constructed like a mirror image of the waiting  room, until we were  left alone with a solitary man drinking Fernet and the barmaid,  who  sat enthroned on a stool behind the counter, legs crossed, filing her  nails  with complete devotion and concentration. Austerlitz commented  in passing of this  lady, whose peroxide-blond hair was piled up into  a sort of bird’s nest, that she  was the goddess of time past. And on  the wall behind her, under the lion crest of  the kingdom of Belgium,  there was indeed a mighty clock, the dominating feature  of the  buffet, with a hand some six feet long traveling round a dial which  had  once been gilded, but was now blackened by railway soot and  tobacco smoke. During  the pauses in our conversation we both noticed  what an endless length of time went  by before another minute had  passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of that  hand, which  resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every   time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour  from the future  and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that  one’s heart almost stopped.With an Introduction by James Wood; Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; The New York Times \/ Book Review \/ Best Books of the 21st Century","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303626821861,"sku":"NP9780812982619","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812982619.jpg?v=1767721966","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/austerlitz-isbn-9780812982619","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}