65 pages 2 hours read

Austerlitz

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

Austerlitz is a historical novel by W. G. Sebald first published in 2001. Sebald was a German writer and academic who wrote mainly about the loss of memory and the Holocaust. Austerlitz, Sebald’s final novel, centers on an architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz, who is tormented by his repressed past as a Jewish child evacuated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. The book was an international bestseller and won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

This guide refers to the eBook version of the 2011 Modern Library Trade Paperback Edition.

Plot Summary

The main character is Jacques Austerlitz, called Austerlitz throughout the novel, who tells his life story to an unnamed narrator in installments. Now a middle-aged architectural historian, Austerlitz fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 because it wasn’t safe from Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Austerlitz’s story begins: Upon his arrival in England as a child refugee, he is sent to live with a Welsh couple, Emyr and Gwendolyn Elias, a Methodist minister and his wife. They’re an older couple who aren’t in great health, and Austerlitz tries to cause them as little trouble as possible.

Together, they live in a Welsh market town, and Austerlitz’s new family sends him to a private school.

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