Austerlitz is the closest Sebald comes to writing a “real” novel, with a protagonist driven to solve the mysteries of his lost past. Born in Prague, Jacques Austerlitz was evacuated by train at the age of four, along with other Jewish children, to escape the war. An emotionally frozen Welsh Calvinist couple raise him; in the silence and austerity of their airless house, he “forgets” his early years (much as the Germany of Sebald’s youth managed to “forget” the recent past). When the “vortex of past time” becomes too turbulent, he suffers a breakdown: “I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence. . All my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world.”
Despite its having something resembling a plot, Austerlitz is typically meditative, digressive, undramatic, and shuns the techniques of the realistic novel, a genre for which Sebald felt impatience, even some contempt, as will be seen in the interviews. Austerlitz is my favorite after The Rings of Saturn, perhaps because as a novelist myself, I enjoy seeing how Sebald remakes the genre on his own terms. Some critics, though, including Arthur Lubow in the interview that follows, sense in Austerlitz “the author’s unconventional mind creaking against the walls of convention.” And Michael Hofmann finds the story “inevitably trite.”
Like many writers of genius, Sebald dwells always on the same large themes. His favorite is the swift blossoming of every human endeavor and its long slow death, either through natural or man-made disaster, leaving a wealth of remains to be pored over, not to mention vast human suffering. His notions of time make this panoramic view possible. Like the spectral wanderers of his novels — all of them facets of Sebald himself, the prism — he sees time as plastic, irregular, subjective, “a disquiet of the mind.” Only our panic willfully orders it by the movements of the planets. Past and present might be concurrent or not, might stop and start with the erratic spasms of the mind, of memory. Why might we not have “appointments to keep in the past” just as we do in the future? But in our collective amnesia, we erase time as we go, forgetting what defines us. He has not forgotten; he pieces together the shards to remind us. And by some unfathomable sleight of hand, in making things clear and whole, he gives them the luster of mystery.
The Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through. He spends sleepless, despairing nights in bleak hotel rooms, frequently in a state of emotional or physical collapse. Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around. He sees apparitions, figures from history gliding by. He visits deserted museums, “collections of oddities”; he photographs landscapes, streets, monuments, ticket stubs. Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage.
Like the author, the narrator is German and left home young. Returning to his native town revives the unease — even disgust — that made him leave: “I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves.” Sometimes he visits or merely recalls an old friend, and we hear the friend’s story, very like his own, in a voice like his own. All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator; as he explains in Arthur Lubow’s interview, “it’s all relayed through this narrative figure. It’s as he remembers, so it’s in his cast.”
Among the relentless examples of “the insatiable urge for destruction,” the most urgent is the physical and metaphysical damage of the war waged by the Reich. With his enveloping suspicion of something having been hidden from him and the resulting sense of alienation, a theme he returns to frequently in the interviews, it is hardly surprising that Sebald became the chronicler of the displaced, the exiles, those who imagine, like Jacques Austerlitz, that they are living the wrong life, who sense a ghostly twin beside them.
Sebald was exceptionally fortunate in his English translators, Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell, with whom he collaborated closely and whose task cannot have been simple, given the length and elaborate — one might say baroque, even perverse — architecture of his sentences. Michael Hulse translated The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo. Anthea Bell translated Austerlitz, On the Natural History of Destruction, and Campo Santo. The poet Michael Hamburger, who was a friend of Sebald’s and also appears as a character in The Rings of Saturn, translated the poems After Nature and Unrecounted (also published posthumously). All three make the books read as if they were conceived and written in English; there can be no higher achievement for a translator.
Because Sebald invented a new form of prose writing that makes tangible the contemporary blurring of borders between fiction and nonfiction, critics have puzzled over what to call his works, with their mélange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on painting, entomology, architecture, military fortifications, and more. Sebald himself used the term prose narratives. Baffling classification, they take the shape of the author’s consciousness. What unifies them is the narrator’s distilled voice — melancholy, resonant as a voice in a tunnel, witty: the effluvia of their author’s inner life. And against all odds, from these stories of exile and decay, the voice wrests a magical exhilaration. Several of the writers included here mention the urge to go back and read his books over as soon as they reach the final page. They are not only magnetic, drawing you back. They are evanescent, evaporating as the pages turn, exactly like the lives and settings they brood on. As Sebald writes of a landscape “dissolved in a pearl-gray haze”: “it was the very evanescence of these visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.”
Always, the world is veiled, seen through fog and mist: a “veil of rain,” a “veil of ash,” “a profusion of dusty glitter.” An exiled German painter in The Emigrants loves the accumulation of dust in his studio, “the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little into nothingness.” After a dust storm, the narrator observes, “although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth had ground itself down.” Instead of feeling crushed by the image, we feel oddly sustained. It is the sustenance offered by truth, however somber.
In several of the interviews that follow, Sebald mentions the porousness of the border between the worlds of the living and the dead; in parts of Corsica, he says, people imagine the dead returning to get a piece of bread from the pantry. As a boy, Jacques Austerlitz listens to the village cobbler’s tales of seeing the dead “who had been struck down by fate untimely. . marching up the hill above the town to the soft beat of a drum.” The cobbler shows the boy a piece of black veil his grandfather saved from one of their biers: “Nothing but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world.”