Beyond Genre Essay, Research Paper

Beyond genre Austerlitz by WG Sebald trs Anthea Bell Penguin & # 163 ; 6.99 For some ground, plausibleness in fiction is going harder to prolong, or even achieve. The job has got so bad that even Frank Skinner has noted it in his autobiography, stating something to the consequence that when one reads a sentence such as: & # 8220 ; Maria lit a coffin nail & # 8221 ; one is tempted to respond by stating, & # 8220 ; Oh no she didn & # 8217 ; t & # 8221 ; , and throwing the book off. This is non a job with Sebald, and peculiarly with this novel, which may state & # 8220 ; fiction & # 8221 ; on the dorsum by the barcode, but which has such an unimpugnable nip of veracity that when I called up Penguin to look into on the publication day of the month, and was asked whether I wanted to talk to person in the fiction or non-fiction section, I was stumped, and merely decided on & # 8220 ; fiction, I suppose & # 8221 ; after being prompted by the progressively leery receptionist. This is an accomplishment, non, decidedly non, a failure of tone or technique. For a start, it is written in that really central-European, Thomas Bernhard-ish headlong haste, as if the whole work were itself one individual train of idea & # 8211 ; the book contains no paragraph interruptions, but as it is set in reasonably large type, with generous borders, this is something you barely notice. Besides which, as with Sebald & # 8217 ; s other work, it comes interlarded with reproductions of exposure, maps, ticket stubs, architectural diagrams, poignant and arresting, in a mode which both is and is non a catch. One of these exposures is besides printed on the forepart screen, of the improbably named Austerlitz, in fancy frock at the age ( harmonizing to the text ) of five. As at least one referee has pointed

out, the child in the picture looks a bit older than five; could it in fact be Sebald himself? It could well be, which makes his relationship to the book all the more interesting. For the Austerlitz of the novel is a man the (nameless) narrator meets in the waiting room (Salle des pas perdus) of Antwerp Centraal Station, studying its architecture. They meet, coincidentally, in London years later, and this time Austerlitz tells him his story, in which his memories begin first with being brought up by a Welsh minister and his wife, but which, through random chance he then realises predate that: his true origins are in Prague, where at five years of age he was sent away on a Kindertransport by his Jewish mother as the Nazis began to make life in her native city not just intolerable, but dangerous. The search for the roots of childhood memory is, in life as well as in fiction, urgent and crucial. Which means that after a certain point in this book, one starts reading it through a blur of incipient tears, as well as through the triple curtain of Sebald/narrator/Austerlitz. Is it this very distancing from the events it describes that makes the book so real, more like a work of history than a novel? Or is it the posture of the narrative, at the same time level and searching – which itself has been so well translated that you cannot help thinking that, while it was written in German, it was thought in English? Sebald, born in Germany in 1944, settled permanently in England in 1970; his evocations of this country are, incidentally, unimprovable. It is hard to shake off the thought that this incredible (by which I mean credible) work is itself an atonement for the acts of the Nazis.