Austerlitz

To begin, you should understand that Austerlitz is a highly conceptual and experimental novel. I respect that. I don’t want to sound dismissive just because this isn’t mainstream narrative fiction. I enjoy a Rauschenberg as much as a Rembrandt. But I’m sorry to say that I hated this.

All the intentional stylistic choices meant to create a haunted atmosphere and reflect the themes of fragmented memory mostly just drove me crazy: the lack of paragraphs, the multi-page sentences, the absence of quotation marks, the meandering structure, and the sporadic inclusion of grainy, low-quality images. There is a moving story at the center of the novel — the rescue of thousands of Jewish children during the Holocaust by separating them from their parents — but that story is told in a way that was impossible for me to connect with. Obviously it worked for others.

I’m still giving a couple of stars because I really did appreciate the attempt to explore the intersecting concepts of identity and memory. I respected the addition of something wholly new to the WWII genre. I thought the detailed descriptions of architecture as a representation of history were interesting. But the end product just did not resonate with me at all.

Book author: W.G. Sebald