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Title details for Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald - Wait list

Austerlitz

by W.G. Sebald
Richard Matthews
Audiobook
0 of 4 copies available
Wait time: About 5 weeks
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0 of 4 copies available
Wait time: About 5 weeks
W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle.

“Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year
 
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize
 
A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. 
 
Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 7, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525500896
      • File size: 206847 KB
      • Duration: 07:10:55

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Much is gained, but more is lost in this audio version of the last novel of W.G. Sebald. The lure of discovering who we are through memory in the face of its inherent repression and distortion over time, the nightmare of history (especially the Holocaust), and the human desire to collect disparate facts and information to ward off meaninglessness are some of the major themes of this unorthodox novel (if it is one). The long, beautifully constructed translated sentences are reminiscent of Dickens and Poe, and narrator Richard Matthews gives them his full attention with a crisp and self-assured, but necessarily detached, British voice. The rhythms and poetry of the language are thus fully accessible to the listener, though the vignettes, asides, digressions, and elaborations, which make up a large part of the book, fly by at a dizzying pace. Also, the many photos and graphics that document the places described in Jacques Austerlitz's wanderings and serve as counterbalances to the text's ephemerality are, of course, not available through audio. Through no fault of the narrator, this book needs to be held in hand. P.W. 2003 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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