In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and 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 and he is forced to explore what happened to him fifty years before…
Originally written in German, and almost entirely as a continuous stream of text, Austerlitz is a beautiful exploration of the power of human memory.
Beginning in Antwerp station, the narrator (whose name we never know) begins to tell Austerlitz’s life story, starting from his earliest memories with his foster parents in the Welsh countryside. The household is strict, religious and tense.
A comment from a teacher at his boarding school is the beginning of Austerlitz’s journey towards uncovering his past. On realising that he had another existence before his Welsh upbringing, he travels to Prague and his trip unlocks brief but vivid memories from his early childhood. After Prague, his journey takes him through the mountains of Germany, to London and to Paris.
The language throughout this book is beautiful. The sentences are long and the pace is unhurried. The descriptions of the places Austerlitz visits on his journey and throughout his life are evocative and convey a sense of movement, especially in descriptions of nature, including some captivating passages when Austerlitz is travelling through the Welsh mountains. Alongside this, there is always a sense of something wistful and intangible, as though Austerlitz knows that he is missing something but he does not know what that something is. Despite the picture he builds of his former life, he can never really know his true self because so much of his history is a mystery to him.
Human memory is a strange thing – fleeting and dream-like, yet at once powerful and vital to one’s identity. Austerlitz fuses all of these qualities to create a linguistic masterpiece.