Austerlitz

Just finished reading Austerlitz, and everything the reviews say is true. Sebald really did manage to come up with a whole new genre of book, neither memoir nor novel nor concatenation of postmodern digressions. Austerlitz is a great and haunting work, but I shall leave the superlatives and the exegesis to the professionals. I would just like to point out a parallel which seems obvious to me but which I haven't seen drawn elsewhere: to the post-war German artist Anselm Kiefer. Both Germans reinvented their artforms in order to deal with WWII and its aftermath, the guilt-ridden silence into which much of Germany fell. Austerlitz was written by an expatriate German and centers on an Anglified Jew who never sets foot in Germany or learns about the Holocaust until well into middle age. It is hard not to see Austerlitz's inability to face up to his past – something which accounts for his neurasthenia and eventual nervous breakdown – as an allegory for Germany as a whole.

Austerlitz had another effect on me, too: I intend to go out later today and purchase a small pocket camera which I can load with black and white film and carry around with me at all times, in much the same way as Sebald did. My little Canon APS camera is better for snapshots, and my 35mm compact is too slow, what with all its autofocus nonsense and tendency to turn itself on by mistake, dirtying the lens. I'm thinking of getting an old-fashioned rangefinder. There's a Japanese one I've got my eye on: I think I'll check it out before my Spanish class this afternoon.

Posted by Felix at 1:05 EST