Austerlitz

Product Description

” Austerlitz” is W. G. Sebald`s classic novel of post-war Europe. In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport & placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity & he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, ” Austerlitz”
- having avoided all clues that might point to his origin
- finds the past returning to haunt him & he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before. ” Austerlitz” is W.G. Sebald`s melancholic masterpiece. ” Mesmeric, haunting & heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald”. (Eileen Battersby, ” Irish Times”). ” Greatness in literature is still possible”. (John Banville, ” Irish Times”, Books of the Year). ”A work of obvious genius”. (” Literary Review”). ”A fusion of the mystical & the solid... His art is a form of justice
- there can be, I think, no higher aim”. (” Evening Standard”). ” Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art”. (” The Times Literary Supplement”).”I have never read a book that provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague & their treatment by the Nazis”. (” Observer”). ”A great book by a great writer”. (Boyd Tonkin, ” Independent”). W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944 & died in December 2001. He studied German language & literature in Freiburg, Switzerland & Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester & settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia & is the author of ” The Emigrants”, ” The Rings of Saturn”, ” Vertigo”, ” Austerlitz”, ” After Nature”, ” On the Natural History of Destruction”, ” Campo Santo”, ” Unrecounted”, ”A Place in the Country”. His selected poetry is published in a volume called ” Across the Land & the Water”.