Is there a story? In this book, yes. The Rings of Saturn was in the nature of a travel diary, but Austerlitz is in essence the story of a young Jewish boy sent from Prague to London to escape persecution by the occupying Nazis. He is cared for by a strict evangelical family in North Wales, and his identity is concealed from him. His attempts to uncover that identity, and to find out what happened to his parents, constitute the book's central preoccupation.
But, in a sense, this story, terrible though it is when it focuses on the details of the hounding out of the Jews from Prague and Paris, with their property being seized by the occupying German authorities and carefully catalogued in huge warehouses before being expropriated, isn't really at the heart of the book. Rather, its essence seems to lie in its description of buildings.
Sebald is profoundly interested in large and ambitious building projects -- railway stations, palaces, one particular concentration camp disguised as a charming holiday resort, and fortresses. The way these grand projects represent human aspirations, yet at the same time are doomed to crumble and become overgrown with weeds, is probably the author's most abiding preoccupation.
Another unusual feature of the book is that it contains many black and white photographs, all placed in the text at precisely the point in the story they illustrate. For hundreds of years now illustrations have been held to be very inferior adjuncts to any serious literary text, with only a few artists, such as the English poet, Blake, bucking the trend. Now W.G.Sebald has placed them back as authorially authenticated elements of his grand composition.
Once you've finished this wonderful book you're haunted by the melancholy tone of this solitary, meditative figure. If there's a literary precursor, it's the English 17th century essayist Sir Thomas Browne. It's no accident that places associated with Browne open The Rings of Saturn. He too was concerned above all with death and mutability. And it's in his company that W.G. Sebald, despite writing in German, will probably enter the pantheon of English Literature.
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