In a No Man's Land of Memories and Loss
With W. G. Sebald's haunting new book, ''Austerlitz,'' we are transported to a memoryscape -- a twilight, fogbound world of half-remembered images and ghosts that is reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's ''Wild Strawberries,'' Kafka's troubling fables of guilt and apprehension and, of course, Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past.'' As in Proust's great masterwork, ordinary objects and places reverberate with memories, but in ''Austerlitz'' those memories -- triggered by a train station, say, a deserted house, an old photograph or a domed ceiling -- tend to remain fragmentary, elusive and vaguely sinister.
October 26, 2001ARTSREVIEW
From the New York Times
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