Austerlitz

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La dimensione più congeniale al protagonista è quella austera e solitaria, in cui "prendere le distanze se qualcuno mi veniva troppo vicino" e non veder "altro intorno a me se non misteri e segni". I exist only because my German grandmother and her brother were two of 35 children brought to England at the end of the Second World War on the Kindertransport by an English Red Cross Charity worker named Edith Snellgrove. For whatever reason, she fell in love with my grandmother and my great-uncle, and, though not formally, adopted them. My grandmother is still alive today, whom I see twice a week, though she suffers from dementia and schizophrenia and has no command of the German language anymore. My brother and I slightly resent the fact we were never taught German, or indeed any other language, as children. Edith Snellgrove spoke 9 languages fluently and though she taught my grandmother bits of French and Russian, she was never invested enough to learn properly. In fact, when I was a child, my grandmother went once a week to German classes, to try and hold onto her native language that was left in Germany when she was brought to a foreign country by, essentially, a stranger, and had to learn English. Her father, Friedhelm Jung, died in 1944 in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; he was stationed in Crimea as soon as the War broke out—he was already in prison in 1939, for refusing to give money to the Hitler Church. With me now, in my home, I have a box filled with photographs and even Friedhelm’s letters from Crimea that he sent to his wife, detailing, where he could, what it was like and how he was. These letters have mostly been translated by an old German teacher my grandmother met at a Quaker Meeting House. I could go on, but all this I hope to one day write into a novel, and this isn’t about my grandmother, but about Austerlitz. How many WWII novels have been written, published, read? Too many, perhaps? And yet none – I repeat – none possess the full crushing force of Austerlitz, paradoxically a (post-)WWII novel in reverse mode. Or the novelistic version of the film Memento, with Proustian underpinnings.

Per quanto riguarda l’altra questione, direi che questo libro è la quintessenza del romanzo, e che del genere ‘romanzo’ utilizza espedienti vari e ingegnosi: l’intreccio di materiali diversi (storia, riflessione filosofica, cronaca, fotografia, architettura, pittura, botanica, entomologia…), la ricerca-indagine, il cambiamento dei punti di vista (costantemente due, il narratore e Austerlitz, e di quando in quando, ne entra un terzo, Vera sopra tutti, ma anche altri testimoni/commentatori/portatori di informazioni che Austerlitz più o meno casualmente incontra e incrocia), le scatole cinesi, il racconto nel racconto… al punto che io per tutto il tempo della lettura ho avuto in mente film (“F For Fake” di Welles, “L'hypothèse du tableau volé”, e sempre di Ruiz, “Les trois couronnes du matelot” con quella incredibile fotografia di Sacha Vierny che da sola genera immagini e atmosfera e attesa) e Cortazar e… The narrator, who had Jacques Austerlitz as a teacher, talks with him. Jacques is now a lecturer at a London art history institute. But he has had so many other interests, so many different passions, so many other lives, so many other trades. The 100 best books of the 21st century". The Guardian. 21 September 2019 . Retrieved 22 September 2019. Not least I would recommend reading Austerlitz's account of trying to find out what happened to his father in the new Bibliothèque Nationale and failing to do so because its design appears calculated to frustrate the aspirations of its readers, such that one realises that the mentality which led to the concentration camp at Terezen is perfectly capable of designing comparable buildings in the present.

The more we come to know Austerlitz in his recounting of his past, how he arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee, age four, from Nazi infested Czechoslovakia, how he was adopted and raised by an older Welsh minister and his wife, how, as an adult, he returned to Prague and located a close friend of his vanished mother and father, how he then further traced the fate of his parents, the more our hearts open not only to Austerlitz and his family but all the many men and women and children who suffered the brutality and madness of the Nazis. At dawn, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée was assembled near the tiny village of Austerlitz, some 60 miles from Vienna. Though this style makes the book quite engaging and easy to read, it also makes the reader doubt the accuracy of that personal detail and dialogue. There were more than a few instances where I read through a passage of dialogue and thought ‘there is no way that was actually spoken—it is too convenient in terms of the story Manceron is writing.’ In the bibliography, Manceron writes that he consulted a number of memoirs from these historical figures, and as such it seems likely that most of the dialogue featured in the book was taken from those sources. However, there are no citations in the text and thus no way to determine what source he was using for a particular conversation. As a result, I treated the dialogue with a good deal of skepticism, considering much of it true in spirit, if not in actuality. Nevertheless, I still think this book is valuable. In my opinion, Manceron gave a balanced and reliable account of the campaign, though it should be considered that he used many more French sources than Allied sources. Austerlitz by Claude Manceron is a lively, dramatic narrative history which relates the story of Napoleon’s 1805 campaign and, in particular, its climatic conclusion at the battle of Austerlitz on December 2nd. What distinguishes this book from other histories of this campaign is the author’s style of narrative. Manceron writes as though he is telling a story. He does this by developing the historical personalities, bringing them to life through his selection and sequence of scenes and by delving into the dialogue, thoughts, and feelings of some of the principal figures. It is impossible to tell how much of this narrative, if any, is true, although it is illustrated, as was Rings of Saturn, with out-of-focus, grey photographs of people and places, which lend it veracity, most of all the picture of the narrator himself, with his distinctive wavy hair, looking out inqusitively at the photographer and dressed as for a fancy dress party in Prague just before the war.

As I sit here at my computer writing this review, contemplating my reading experience, I have the strong urge to reread it. This time I will be completely zoned in, impervious to distractions, and grasp the nuance of every sentence the moment I read it (I do beguile myself). I want to brush away the feeling that I failed the book in some way. With that feeling, I also feel euphoric, like I’ve ventured into something unknown and came away a better person. New vistas may have opened up in my mind. What else can I deduce from all this other than that the book is a masterpiece? Jacques Austerlitz yıllarca bastırmış olduğu, ama artık içinde tutamadığı ve çıkmasına izin verdiği “reddedilmişlik ve yok edilmişlik” duygusuyla baş edeme­mesini anlatırken, geçirdiği ruhsal bunalımın hastanede sonlanması hiç şaşırtıcı olmadı benim için, bunca yük nasıl taşınır ki ? Bazen bir müze, bazen bir hastane veya kütüphanAlthough he was outnumbered by the Russian and Austrian allies of the Third Coalition, the French Emperor forced them to do battle on his own terms. Austerlitz forces us to reflect on man's vanity and specific human constructions, fortresses obsolete and overcome by the progress they have been completing. Constructed to defend and ultimately used to kill innocent people, built modern libraries to promote the culture and leave a trace in the history of their initiator. And finally, unsuitable for promoting culture, a book made to recall a past that we seek to move aside, the importance of traces of spent not forgetting a message from a German anti-Nazi author. McTague, Carl. "Escaping the Flood of Time: Noah's Ark in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz". Archived from the original on 14 March 2017 . Retrieved 16 April 2004.

The scenes of the Battle of Austerlitz itself are some of the best written on the Battle, and this is nearly a 60 year old book. Manceron's description of the climactic Cavalry duel between the French and Russian Imperial Guard horse made for genuinely exciting reading. O forse no? È davvero tutta qui, come nel breve bellissimo documentario di Alain Resnais sulla Biblioteca Nazionale di Parigi, "Toute la mémoire du monde"? There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes?While he uses excellent sources, listed in his bibliography, he fails to cite them throughout the text. This issue would be more egregious were it not for the fact that some of the stories he relates are related numerous times elsewhere, in properly sourced monographs. The real problem is when it seems that the author may, or may not, have fabricated conversations or pieces of them for dramatic effect. Though the plethora of memoirs and diaries in his bibliography asserts that, likely, he drew from those, just couldn't be bothered to source them.

Austerlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an academic who has an epiphany in a waiting room at London’s Liverpool Street station, recognising this as the place in which he first arrived in Britain as a small boy, travelling on the Kindertransport. if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? In this book, Claude Manceron recreates Austerlitz minute by minute, hour by hour. The reader becomes a privileged witness; we are in the headquarters of the Emperors as they prepare to trap the Grande Armee; in the bivouac of Napoleon where his plan, elaborated bit by bit, changes the trap into a countertrap. We stand on the hill with Soult; charge with the Imperial Guard. As for the protagonist’s surname, I agree with James Wood’s analysis (the battle of Austerlitz --> Auschwitz) but I also thought the fact that Jacques's family name begins with an A and ends with a Z might suggest that the character’s experiences are a summa of many, many others. Austerlitz is akin to Everyman. the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. " The basis of the fiction, if it is a fiction, is that the author and narrator periodically meet, not only in Antwerp, but also in the bar of the former Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Street Station, London, and in a café in Paris. As I said in my first pre-review, I believe Sebald to be one of the most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century. It saddens me greatly that he only managed to write four novels before his death at the age of 57, after suffering a brain aneurysm whilst driving; he died before his car swerved out of control and collided with an oncoming lorry, severely injuring his daughter, though thankfully she survived the crash. There is a brilliant interview that took place, if I remember rightly, just over a week before his death, with Michael Silverblatt which I highly recommend. In fact, Silverblatt is perhaps one of the best interviewers out there for writers and has many fantastic ones, especially his ones with David Foster Wallace.