A strange novel, otherworldly somehow. It reminds me a bit of Sostiene Pereira in that it an account the story of the main character as recounted by someone to whom the story was told.
It also has an otherworldly mistiness or vagueness in that the instalments of the story are told in a variety of settings and countries around Europe through planned or chance encounters between the narrator and the main character, Austerlitz. The setting are described in minute detail, from train stations to seedy cafes.
At the core is the story of the young Jewish children who were sent by their parents to England from Germany in 1938 or 1939 to save them from the coming disaster. Obviously, many of these children were never able to be reunited with their families. Some, like Austerlitz, retained only the vaguest of memories of their origins and grew up not even knowing they were Jewish.
The story is Austerlitz's slow descent into a form of nervous collapse essentially due to a rootlessness and emotional disengagement, and then the slow discovery of something of his origins, his family's past and the source of some of the strange images and pictures he carried in his mind from his early childhood.
There is also the idea of moving through a world where so much of your own history and culture have been erased. (Funnily enough, Palestinians could say the same about their own homeland with the deliberate Israeli policy of destroying all remains of villages. Also Armenians as Turkey has pursued the same policy. And the Balkans where each group tries to write the other out of its territorial history. It is a form of public psychological disturbance or madness.)
A bit hard to get into at first as it is slow, but worth it.
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