Austerlitz

Summary: "The slippage of memory has been the great preoccupation of [Sebald's] work, and with his remarkable new novel, AUSTERLITZ, the struggle to rectify that slippage becomes something more--a guiding principle, and perhaps the only recognizable substance, of our lives. As in his other work, Sebald never states this point outright....Instead, he elicits it elliptically, in a long series of stories that overlap each other,... unexpectedly switch back and turn in on themselves....At the end of this dilatory, elaborately structured and evocative novel, then, we have forgotten altogether our original readerly suspicions about the reality of Austerlitz's story, and taken up the far more unsettling questions that it poses about the reality of our own." [read more]