The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.
If W. G. Sebald had lived longer — he died in a 2001 automobile accident at the age of 57 — he probably would have been named a Nobel laureate. Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Swedish Academy (perhaps best known for his critique of the insularity of American writers) mentioned Sebald during a 2007 interview when listing deceased authors who would have been worthy recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (The other names cited by Engdahl were Ryszard Kapuściński and Jacques Derrida.)
Sebald is poised midway between these two other figures, Kapuściński the practical man of the world and Derrida the theorizing thaumaturge of the academy. Sebald’s writing seems on the surface to be deeply immersed in the day-to-day - an effect accentuated by his unconventional incorporation of black-and-white photographs into his novels. Yet the more deeply one penetrates his stories, the more ethereal they become, existing less in the world around us, and rather in the memories, dreams, obsessions and volatile emotions of his characters.
In Austerlitz, published around the time of his death, Sebald deals with the most solid facts of Germany history, centering on World War II and the Holocaust. This sense of rock-hard reality is further reflected in the title character, who is fixated on architecture and the monuments of civilization, especially fortresses, train stations and other grand edifices meant to stand up against the onslaught of decades or even centuries. But by the time the reader has finished with the novel, this sense of solidity has vanished. Austerlitz seems to exist outside of time and place; characters have the quality of ghosts, and sometimes come across as less real than the dead, who in Sebald’s cosmology, can be more consequential than neighbors or friends or even lovers.
Sebald’s main character, Jacques Austerlitz, is raised by a taciturn Calvinist family in a Welsh foster home during the 1940s. During this period, he thinks his name is Dafydd Elias, and though he knows little of his true origins, he feels alienated from his new family and surroundings. He retains dim memories of an earlier life, a period which ended before his fifth birthday, but he spends his formative years stifling any curiosity as to what these recollections might portend. He is a middle-aged man by the time he starts to unravel the mystery of his own existence, and trace the path that leads him back to his childhood in Czechoslovakia.
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