SOURCE: Banville, John. “The Rubble Artist.” New Republic 225, no. 22 (26 November 2001): 35-8.

In the following review, Banville asserts that Austerlitz contains masterful narrative control and a poignant evocation of European desolation.

For a novelist, the Holocaust is at once a safe subject and a dangerous subject. Safe, because the emotional reaction of practically all readers will be already primed; dangerous, because almost any attempt to deal imaginatively with a crime that is well nigh unimaginable is likely to result in bathos. There is also the moral question of whether an artist has the right to turn such horrors into the stuff of art; Adorno was sure he knew the answer to that one, while even the supremely scrupulous Celan was criticized for the musical beauty of his death-camp poem “Deathfugue.” Perhaps the most succinct statement of the matter was made by Larkin, who in a comment on a poem...