Continuous Vivid Dream

Reading Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald was as challenging as reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (a book I never made it through). Austerlitz is a non-conventional novel with black and white photographs interspersed through the text detailing the life of the main character, Austerlitz. It’s told through a series of conversations between Austerlitz and an unknown narrator and their continual encounters over an extended period of time.

I picked up this novel mostly due to the rave reviews surrounding the work, but clearly I was at a loss to the appeal. It is a very dry story of the mundane travelings of a man and his attention to architecture and his exploration of his past, his connection to the Holocaust, and his early childhood. Apart from a visit to the Jewish ghetto and his mother’s connection to the purge of the Jews, the novel lacked much in terms of action or even dialogue. The novel felt more like a diary of one’s actions as told through his stories with the narrator. But our narrator doesn’t seem to have much to say, and as a reader, we really don’t glean much about his purpose in existing in this novel at all.

If you search other reviews of Austerlitz, they are very praiseworthy of this piece of fiction. I tend to agree more with the review of this Grumpy Old Bookman.