Blending Fact With Fiction.(Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald)(Review)

In "Austerlitz," W. G. Sebald performs a small but significant miracle: he wrests the Holocaust out of the clutches of stale cliche. He does this without ever showing us a death camp or a gas chamber. Instead, this superb novel concentrates on the wreckage of one man's life. Orphaned as a young boy during the Nazi occupation of Prague, Jacques Austerlitz devotes the rest of his life to finding out who he really is and what happened to his parents, and all the while he is haunted by the feeling that he is living a borrowed life. Chronicling this strange odyssey, Sebald shows us, much as he did in "The Emigrants," a previous masterpiece on the same theme, that the horrors of mid-20th-century Europe have no expiration date.

In four genre-bending works of fiction published in the past decade, the 57-year-old Sebald has established himself as one of Europe's most distinctive authors, and certainly its most idiosyncratic. Two of his "novels" are collections of interrelated stories. All of them are narrated in a memoir style by a writer who at least superficially resembles Sebald, who, born and raised in Germany, has spent his adult life as a literature professor in England (he continues to write in German). And all are generously salted with grainy black-and-white photographs, and maps, floor plans and railroad timetables that mysteriously both add to and subtract from the idea that these stories are pretending to be factual.

Reading a Sebald book is like nothing else. Confronted with his strange, intoxicating brew of fact and fiction and digressions on everything from European train stations to the lives and times of certain moths, you wind up not knowing what to believe, or whom. Everything--history, memory--is called into question. It's even hard knowing what to call the books themselves. Clearly they are not novels, a form that Sebald scorns. "It's the quality of the writing which is much more important than the question of the genre," he said in a recent interview in New York City, where he was promoting his new book. "The reader doesn't care what form it is in. I do find that in the standard novel you have to say things like 'said she as she got up and walked over to the mantelpiece.' The grinding noises that the novel makes on every page so irritate me that I can't bear to read them anymore. I'd rather read a telephone directory from Prague in 1920."

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