Melancholy Baby

If the creation of a distinctive, instantly recognizable voice is a sure sign of literary mastery, then W.G. Sebald clearly merits much of the acclaim with which his work has been greeted. Beginning in 1996 with the English-language appearance of “The Emigrants,” the first of his books to be translated from German, and quickly followed by “The Rings of Saturn,” “Vertigo” and now “Austerlitz,” Sebald has produced a body of writing that stands at an intriguingly oblique angle to most serious fiction currently being published. Sebald has been lavishly praised by critics throughout the English-and German-speaking worlds, and he has won a series of major literary awards, including The Times’ 1998 book prize for fiction.

It is Sebald’s elegiac tone--the fastidious vocabulary, melancholy prose rhythms and seductive emotional reticence--that envelops one from the first sentence and helps create the paradoxical synthesis of an isolated, unbridgeable inwardness, combined with an uncanny intimacy between narrator and reader that is the hallmark of his writing. The more Sebald insists on his loneliness, the more powerfully he triggers a compensatory attentiveness, even solicitude, in his reader.

Here, for example, are characteristic passages from early in three of Sebald’s books. They share a scrupulous specificity about date, place, landscape and architecture that is wedded to a shadowy, all-engulfing feeling of emotional disorientation and leaden weariness. It is a feeling that undermines the hope for restorative, purposeful action that prompted the narrator to set out on his travels in the first place:

“In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a country which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.” (“Vertigo”)

“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” (“The Rings of Saturn”)

“In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me.... Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion.” (“Austerlitz”)

Irrespective of the particular theme or structure of the individual book, Sebald’s narrator and the various characters he encounters on his journeys all experience that same feeling of being deeply “unwell.” Key terms such as “distress,” “wretchedness,” “inner desolation,” “a state of almost total immobility” recur like musical motifs linking the separate texts until they seem to be movements from a single fluid composition. But although the strong family resemblance among Sebald’s descriptions gives his work a potentially impressive persistence of vision and tone, it does so at the risk of making the desolation it traces begin to sound like something of a mannerism. The repetition of crucial motifs and perspectives and a certain narrowness of emotional range are major sources of his unsettling power, but they also leave the reader feeling that whole paragraphs could be transposed from one book to another without seriously affecting the work’s integrity, just as, at the level of syntax and rhythm, all of Sebald’s characters, irrespective of age or gender, sound remarkably similar to one another and, most of all, to the narrator himself.

No matter what sites he visits, from English country houses to the piazzas of Verona and Venice or the Belgian fortress of Breendonk (used by the Nazis to torture and imprison their victims), Sebald absorbs the identical precept. In “Austerlitz,” the lesson is learned early and, with slight variations, repeatedly confirmed: “[T]he darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life.” No doubt because he regards any effort to resist that oblivion as doomed, Sebald’s narrator sometimes seems to inhabit a prematurely “extinguished life” himself, and his books thus take on a kind of attenuated, almost posthumous aura. Although Sebald’s narrator occasionally falls back on the term “depression,” that is far too contemporary a diagnostic category for his condition. More apt is the medieval notion of acedia, invoked by Dante and Chaucer and defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a favorite ecclesiastical word, applied primarily to the mental prostration of recluses” and linked especially to scholars and monks. Sebald is not merely a thoroughly “bookish” writer in the way that, say, Joyce, Musil or Proust are. He is also very much a professional academic, a professor of German literature at the University of East Anglia, with a number of critical publications preceding any of his fictional writings, and there is something of the academic’s cloistered melancholy, the acedia of the lifelong scholarly recluse, about his writing.

Unlike depression, though, Sebald’s acedia is not located in a purely personal trauma. It is a response, devastating in the extent of its private effects, but nonetheless communally and historically motivated, to the unbearable weight of human misery and loss, especially as crystallized in the attempted extermination of European Jewry in the Shoah. History is a nightmare into which Sebald’s characters and his books as a whole are trying to awaken. The people he takes seriously have been emotionally deadened, almost to the point of paralysis, by all that has been denied or simply forgotten by those determined never to look backward, and he has learned that a real nightmare is preferable to the inner desiccation of such oblivion.

“Austerlitz” is the story of one such bitter attempt to wake up into history’s nightmare, and it is Sebald’s most direct confrontation so far with the aftereffects of the genocide. The word “Austerlitz” itself is already overlaid with associations. It is the site of one of Napoleon’s greatest victories, of a much-painted Parisian train station named after that battle and, in its sound, eerily akin to Auschwitz. It is also the name of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian with an astonishing wealth of knowledge whom Sebald’s unnamed narrator accidentally encounters in 1967 in Antwerp’s Central Station. There, they begin a dialogue whose piecemeal, gradual unfolding constitutes the book itself. Over many decades, the narrator and Austerlitz pursue a spiraling multilayered conversation that gradually focuses ever more insistently on the mystery of Austerlitz’s identity. He grew up in Wales as Dafydd Elias, raised by a grim Calvinist preacher and former missionary, and only when it came time to apply for a university scholarship was he told his real name. For years, he avoided probing more deeply into such a strange beginning until one day, purely by chance, he sees a young child in the waiting room of the Liverpool Street railroad station in London and has a sudden vision, somewhere between memory and recognition, of himself as a 4-year-old arriving alone in the same room.

From there, Austerlitz begins the painful process of retracing his lost history as the child of cultivated Prague Jews who sent him away to safety in England on one of the last Kindertransport, or child rescue trains. He goes back to Prague and, from an old family friend still living in his childhood apartment house, finds out that his mother was deported, first to Theresienstadt, and then, presumably, to Auschwitz. Later, he learns that the last trace of his father, who had fled to Paris, is a 1942 record of his internment in a camp at Gurs, in the Pyrenean foothills. Austerlitz visits Theresienstadt, seeking in vain for any further clues about his mother, and, in the last pages of the book, prepares to visit Gurs as well. His search for the truth has taken Austerlitz across much of Europe, until the whole continent is explicitly judged as “the scene of some unexpiated crime.”

At times, Austerlitz’s quest becomes deeply moving, especially in the wrenching scenes in which he obsessively examines the few surviving frames from Hitler’s propaganda film about Theresienstadt because he is suddenly convinced that an indistinct figure in the background of one scene is his mother. The photographs embedded in “Austerlitz,” as in all of Sebald’s books, seem less mannered and arbitrary here because the narrative itself turns so powerfully on the need to preserve whatever fragments one can against the ruin of forgetfulness.

Since so many members of my immediate family arrived in England on a Kindertransport from Germany, I read the novel with a strong sense of kinship and sympathy. And yet, for all its considerable strengths, “Austerlitz” is also a highly problematic achievement. The numerous interminable hesitations and digressions, although thematically justifiable as Austerlitz’s way of avoiding more disturbing, personal questions, are simply too long and too improbable to sustain one’s interest. Alarming sentences such as, “Austerlitz launched into a discourse of over two hours” occur all too often, introducing yet another lecture on a wearying array of topics and vitiating the narrative energy to no adequate purpose. The accidental encounters and coincidences that move the book forward can often seem forced and unmotivated, giving the sense of an indifference to--not a reinvention of--literary form. Sebald possesses an undeniably distinctive sensibility and tone, and his writing contains pages of hallucinatory intensity, but there is a weariness with the exigencies of fiction-making that becomes a serious limitation as the book goes on. Originality of voice, it turns out, is a necessary but not a sufficient criterion of literary greatness and, so far, for all the praise and the prizes, Sebald has not yet exhibited the latter.