Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald
Random House

The immigrant experience lies at the heart of great modern literature. The last two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature — the Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul and the Chinese Gao Xingjian — live far from their places of birth (Naipaul in England, Gao in Paris), and both infuse their works with themes of alienation and difference drawn from their multicultural life stories. And yet they are only the latest in a long line of such writers, from Conrad at the beginning of the 20th century through Eliot and Nabokov to Rushdie and Ha Jin today.

Add to this list the work of W.G. Sebald, a German who has lived in England for decades yet writes in his native language and whose novels synthesize a European experience at the end of the 20th century; in the wake of the Somme and Guernica and Auschwitz, his works are a monument to a memory at once personal and universal. With so many of Europe's great living writers focusing on national histories — Saramago, Grass, Konrad — Sebald stands apart as a writer focused on what it means to be European, rather than Portuguese or German or Hungarian.

Sebald, a professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia, has been hailed as a descendant of Kafka, and his works do contain that author's same dark, brooding tone. But Sebald is not as paranoid or claustrophobic as Kafka, and where the latter feared the complexities of the modern world, Sebald is at melancholic over the European experience and the continent's loss of innocence in the 20th century. His books, such as his most recent, "Austerlitz," are interspersed with images, photographs that accompany the narrative but also create a narrative of their own, a black-and-white tableau of a Europe gone forever, a world of iron and railroads and gas lamps and rundown cemeteries.

Many of Sebald's books involve a conceit — a journey, an immigration — through which the author introduces themes of memory and experience, allowing his characters to veer off the narrative path to discuss architecture or Renaissance painting or castle-fortification techniques. "Austerlitz," for example, is the story of the narrator's friendship with a Welsh professor named Jacques Austerlitz, whose amazing life story unfolds over the course of their 30-year friendship. Austerlitz, we learn, is not Welsh but Czech in origin, having been sent off to England on the eve of World War II by his parents. But it was not until his teen years that he learned about his origins, and much of his story is the process of coming to grips with, and then hunting down, his past.

Of all his books, "Austerlitz" is Sebald's best attempt to explore the meaning of memory and history. The book is ably translated by Anthea Bell, and even in English the text exudes a melancholy loneliness, a forced separation from the past, that pervades German culture. Of course, as in all Sebald's work, a central tension in "Austerlitz" is that between memory and language, language being both central to memory and yet never fully able to capture entirely the way people experience the past. Hence the importance of photographs to his work — it is as if Sebald, like his characters, doubts the capacity of his own words, and so he adds illustrations to prove his point.

But "Austerlitz" is as much about the creation of memories as it is about recapturing lost ones. It is an allegory for 21st century Europe, an increasingly homogenized culture eager to move beyond its dark past into a bright, commercialized future. Just as Austerlitz must uncover a painful personal past, so too, Sebald fears, must future generations continuously uncover the unpleasant facts of the European past. At the same time, though, it is Austerlitz's discovery of his past that motivates him in other aspects of his life — academics, his love life — and one suspects that, had he not uncovered it, he would be a lonely Welsh farmer, uneasy with his life but not knowing why. For Sebald, the same clearly holds true for Europe — if it ignores its past, it will be condemned to a future of provincialism and myopia.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)