Austerlitz by Wg Sebald
W. G. Sebald's celebrated masterpiece, "one of the supreme works of art of our time" (The Guardian), follows a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle."Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Kafka's troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
One of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the 21st Century * A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century * A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize
A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.
Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers' stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald's unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz's ongoing efforts to understand who he is--a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.
Sebald was born in 1944 in Wertach im Allgau, Germany. In Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester, he studied German language and literature. He spent thirty years as a professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and was the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation from 1989 to 1994. The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz, which he previously translated, have won numerous international honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literary Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. In December of 2001, he passed away. This is an excerpt from the Hardcover edition.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780812982619 |
| ISBN 10 | 0812982614 |
| Title | Austerlitz |
| Author | Wg Sebald |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2011-12-06 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |