While he uses excellent sources, listed in his bibliography, he fails to cite them throughout the text. This issue would be more egregious were it not for the fact that some of the stories he relates are related numerous times elsewhere, in properly sourced monographs. The real problem is when it seems that the author may, or may not, have fabricated conversations or pieces of them for dramatic effect. Though the plethora of memoirs and diaries in his bibliography asserts that, likely, he drew from those, just couldn't be bothered to source them.

Le fotografie, bellissime, spezzano la lettura: e più ci si avvicina alla fine e più sembra che aumentino e compaiano anche le prime interruzioni, i primi spazi bianchi: proprio quando il libro sta per finire, e io non lo volevo affatto lasciare, volevo che continuasse, senza sosta. Standing on the ruins of history, standing both in and on top of history’s depository, Jacques Austerlitz is joined by his name to these ruins: and again, at the end of the book, as at the beginning, he threatens to become simply part of the rubble of history, a thing, a depository of facts and dates, not a human being.” The French army had some 9,000 casualties in the Battle of Austerlitz, while Russian and Austrian allied forces had about 15,000 casualties. In addition, about 11,000 Russian and Austrian troops were captured. The weight of the loss to literature with his early death—of all the books he might have gone on to write—is counterbalanced only by the enigmatic pressure of the work he left behind. His four prose fictions, “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn,” and “Austerlitz” are utterly unique. They combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography in the crucible of his haunting prose style to create a strange new literary compound. Susan Sontag, in a 2000 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, asked whether “literary greatness [was] still possible.” She concluded that “one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.”It is impossible to tell how much of this narrative, if any, is true, although it is illustrated, as was Rings of Saturn, with out-of-focus, grey photographs of people and places, which lend it veracity, most of all the picture of the narrator himself, with his distinctive wavy hair, looking out inqusitively at the photographer and dressed as for a fancy dress party in Prague just before the war. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the subsequent German invasion of Czechoslovakia meant that his father had to flee to Paris, never to be seen or heard from again, his letters to his family confiscated by the German authorities. His mother managed to arrange for her son to be sent on a Kindertransport to London. He was adopted by a Nonconformist preacher and his wife, near Bala in North Wales. The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.” Sebald describes a universe which is peculiar but recognisable, the way experience of the world can be shaped by a strongly academic and historical intelligence. I can't really comprehend his prose style, so distinctive in the length of his sentences and the slight archaism of manner, the monotony of its cadences probably due to the fact that it was originally written in German and then translated. But I would strongly recommend anyone who has not experienced his writing to do so, because it succeeds in communicating issues of great importance concerning time, memory and human experience.

For me, Austerlitz is the quintessence of my ideal book. An intellectual adventure and an emotional earthquake at the same time. I adore the author's sublime and unobtrusive use of symbols, especially water. The clarity and elegance of his writing style, particularly while discussing complex philosophical topics like the perception of time, were breathtaking also. 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 in another? The Battle of Trafalgar, oil on canvas by John Christian Schetky, c. 1841; in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. (more)

Summary

space contains all the hours of my past life, all the supressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entrained.” Austerlitz by Claude Manceron is a lively, dramatic narrative history which relates the story of Napoleon’s 1805 campaign and, in particular, its climatic conclusion at the battle of Austerlitz on December 2nd. What distinguishes this book from other histories of this campaign is the author’s style of narrative. Manceron writes as though he is telling a story. He does this by developing the historical personalities, bringing them to life through his selection and sequence of scenes and by delving into the dialogue, thoughts, and feelings of some of the principal figures. Recently, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a series of five fifteen-minute audio essays from people who knew Sebald (or Max, as he preferred to be called—he hated his first name, Winfried, because he felt that it sounded too much like the woman’s name Winnifred). Contributors include his English translator Anthea Bell, the poet George Szirtes, and the academic and novelist Christopher Bigsby, a colleague of Sebald’s at the University of East Anglia.

I was immediately hypnotised by the curious prose style, so flat and ostensibly inconsequential, which describes a kind of meditative interior monologue, not at all the world as it is seen and described by an ordinary person, but a view of the world seen through a glass darkly and refracted through the strange and sometimes uncomfortable imagination of a dyspeptic and exceptionally knowledgeable, middle-aged professor of German literature, whom one presumes has never been married and who decides to take a long and entirely purposeless walk round the shores of East Anglia meditating on aspects of its history and what he sees en route. They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementos stranded in the Terezín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them.” The 100 best books of the 21st century". The Guardian. 21 September 2019 . Retrieved 22 September 2019.This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.***** Is literary greatness still possible? What would a noble literary enterprise look like? One of the few answers available to English-speaking readers is the work of W.G. Sebald.” no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice in the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.” McTague, Carl. "Escaping the Flood of Time: Noah's Ark in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz". Archived from the original on 14 March 2017 . Retrieved 16 April 2004. Not least I would recommend reading Austerlitz's account of trying to find out what happened to his father in the new Bibliothèque Nationale and failing to do so because its design appears calculated to frustrate the aspirations of its readers, such that one realises that the mentality which led to the concentration camp at Terezen is perfectly capable of designing comparable buildings in the present.