Austerlitz

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In the summer of 1967, a man who remains unnamed but who resembles the author W. G. Sebald, is visiting Belgium. At the Centraal Station in Antwerp, he sees a fellow traveler, with fair, curiously wavy hair, who is wearing heavy walking boots, workman’s trousers made of blue calico, and a well-made but antiquated jacket. He is intently studying the room and taking notes. This is Jacques Austerlitz. The two men fall into conversation, have dinner at the station restaurant, and continue to talk into the night. Austerlitz is a voluble scholar—he explains, to the book’s narrator, about the slightly grotesque display of colonial confidence represented by Antwerp’s Centraal Station, and talks generally about the history of fortification. It is often our mightiest projects, he suggests, that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.

Austerlitz and the Sebald-like narrator meet again—a few months later, in Brussels; then, later still, on the promenade at Zeebrugge. It emerges that Jacques Austerlitz is a lecturer at an institute of art history in London, and that his scholarship is unconventional. He is obsessed with monumental public buildings, like law courts and prisons, railway stations and lunatic asylums, and his investigations have swollen beyond any reasonable raison d’etre, “proliferating in his hands into endless preliminary sketches for a study, based entirely on his own views, of the family likeness between all these buildings.” For a while, the narrator visits Austerlitz regularly in London, but they fall out of touch until 1996, when he happens to meet Austerlitz again, this time at Liverpool Street Station.

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