SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “A Journey Without Maps.” Spectator 287, no. 9035 (6 October 2001): 64-5.

In the following review, Brookner finds Austerlitz a harrowing blend of memory, digression, and observation.

Exiles inhabit another dimension, somewhere beyond nostalgia, in which acuity of vision and the weight of memory combine to convey a strangeness not available to innocent natives. The Russian Andreï Makine, now writing in French, and the German W. G. Sebald have produced books, none finer than their present productions, which transport the reader not only to a different place but to a different time. Both have a preternatural ability to establish a reality which has left indelible traces in their respective memories, so that their accounts of what has vanished outweigh present circumstances and force recognition of what it must be like to live a posthumous life, one which has no connection with their day-to-day occupations in the translated present. In...