SOURCE: Landon, Philip. Review of Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald. Review of Contemporary Fiction 21, no. 3 (fall 2001): 196.

In the following review, Landon offers praise for Austerlitz.

[Austerlitz, t]he fourth novel by the German expatriate author W. G. Sebald records the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, an eccentric architectural historian born in Prague and raised by foster parents in Wales. Battling the alienation that has wrecked his life, Austerlitz eventually reclaims his origins from the darkness of the Holocaust, aspiring to “a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life.” Sebald's narrator, driven by a similar impulse, shudders to think “how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.” Sebald employs an...