Austerlitz - 11-16-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/24/2025] 

This note concerns not the battle but W. G. Sebald's novel, Austerlitz (Random House, 2001; Anthea Bell, translator). I finished reading the novel last night. This morning, Steve Link asked me what I thought, and I told him it was a wild ride. It is a mystery novel and a Holocaust novel, and it is the kind of novel where a paragraph can run for pages upon pages, where the musicality of the language obscures the experiments and the sparse action and sparser plot.

There is a narrator who meets Austerlitz, then tells Austerlitz's story. Oh, yeah, no quotation marks. Not it really matters.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Austerlitz began in reply to my question about the hisotry of the Antwerp station, when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish gray barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power - at that time, now so long ago although it determines our lives to this day; it was the personal wish of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money sudenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would being international renown to his aspiring state....

 p 9

Yes, that is one sentence. I picked it at random, looking for an example of Sebald's dialog. I wish I could show this to my teachers, who told me I put too much into my sentences.

 Oh, yeah, it is also a quest novel - which is tied up with the mystery aspect. The mystery has to do with Austerlitz's identity.

Sebald makes me think of José Saramago and Laszlo Kraznahockai. I categorize them as fire hose writers - they shoot out a strong, broad stream of words. They make not think of Henry James, but of Marcel Proust - I feel an emotional energy, a baring of emotions, that is to me Proustian than Jamesian. Hm. This could also be me exercising my vocabulary. I do not see how I could write a whole novel in this style - I do not have the energy for the job. Read them and see what you think.

If nothing else, let American writers create as wildly as Europeans! That's how to make America great.

One more bit of business about the book: it has photos. It is in a very non-cheesy way illustrated. There lies an idea.

Thanks to Cherry Hill Public Library, 400 N. Kings Highway, Cherry Hill, NJ for lending this novel to the Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution through the inter-library loan program. You have helped my continuing education. 

I have passed the novel to Max G. Now, I go back to John Dewey.

sch

[4/24/2025. I did not think through the implications of King Leopold in the question. All the Belgian wealth came from the barbarities visited upon the people of Congo while Leopold ruled it. This is the background to Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. I have not read King Leopold’s Ghost, but have read about the book; it brings the story back into the light.

I also found The Obsessive Fictions of László Krasznahorkai by Dustin Illingworth on The Paris Review Blog, something I had not read before, which diverted for too much time on day when time is short but was too entertaining not to see through to the end, and which says something along the same lines as I hinted at above:

...His novels—equal parts artful attenuation and digressive deluge—suggest a Beckettian impulse overwhelmed by obsessive proclivities. The epic length of a Krasznahorkai sentence slowly erodes its own reality, clause by scouring clause, until at last it releases the terrible darkness harbored at its core. Many of his literary signatures—compulsive monologue, apocalyptic egress, terminal gloom—are recognizably Late Modern. But the extravagant disintegration and sly mischief of the work make him difficult to mistake for anyone else. There are the sudden, demonic accelerations; the extraordinary leaps in intensity; the gorgeous derangements of consciousness; the muddy villages of Mitteleuropa; the abyssal laughter; the pervasive sense of a choleric god waiting patiently just offstage. Here is fiction that collapses into minute strangeness and explodes into vast cosmology....

sch]