Austerlitz - Brossura

Sebald, W.G.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0676974341 ISBN 13: 9780676974348

Casa editrice: Vintage Canada, 2002

Riassunto

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. An orphan who came to England alone in the summer of 1939 and was raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife as their own, Austerlitz grew up with no conscious memory of where he came from.

W.G. Sebald embodies in Austerlitz the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the mind’s defenses against trauma. Along the way, this novel of many riches dwells magically on a variety of subjects -- railway architecture, military fortifications; insets, plants, and animals; the constellations; works of art; the strange contents of the museum of a veterinary school; a small circus; and the three capital cities that loom over the book, London, Paris, and Prague -- in the service of its astounding vision.

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Recensione:

“[H]is impassioned demand to keep memory alive makes Austerlitz an unforgettable legacy for an extraordinary writer.... [Sebald’s] greatest work.” -- Maclean’s

"W. G. Sebald is a monster -- a gorgeous and unwaveringly assured writer, a bold formal innovator, and a man always plunging into the core of identity, singular and national. In Austerlitz, he's created his richest and most emotionally devastating story, and this book might be his finest." -- Dave Eggers, "who has no right to be commenting on this man."

"With untraceable swiftness and assurance, W. G. Sebald's writing conjures from the details and sequences of daily life, and their circumstances and encounters, from apparent chance and its unsounded calculus, the dimension of dream and a sense of the depth of time that make his books, one by one, indispensable. He evokes at once the minutiae and the vastness of individual existence, the inconsolable sorrow of history and the scintillating beauty of the moment and its ground of memory. Each book seems to be something that surely was impossible, and each (upon every re-reading) is unique and astonishing." -- W. S. Merwin

L'autore:

W. G. Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming Professor of European Literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His three previous books won several international awards, including the L.A. Times Book Award for fiction, the Berlin Literature Prize and the Literatur Nord Prize. W. G. Sebald was killed in a car accident at age 57 in December 2001.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Vintage Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0676974341
• ISBN 13: 9780676974348
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile