Austerlitz

V. G. Sebald's (1944–2001) novel Austerlitz, which many critics call the most significant German-language novel of the 21st century, was published in 2001, shortly before the author's tragic death in a car accident. This novel, or a "prose book of an uncertain genre", as Sebald himself called it, is distinguished not only by an unusual, labyrinthine plot, which the author builds with the care of a spider weaving its web, but also by a special poetic language, which turns this work into a long poem about the search for a lost childhood.
The unnamed narrator repeatedly meets the enigmatic recluse Jacques Austerlitz, a lover of European landscapes and architecture, who tells him about his long-standing efforts to uncover the secret of his own origins. This search takes him almost across Europe and prompts him to visit various "places of memory" of recent German and European history — from Antwerp to London, from Paris to Marienbad, and from Prague to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. And this is only the external, plot contour of the novel, saturated with historical excursions, poetic observations and melancholic reflections on the (un)inhabitability of space and the passing of time, with which a person is forced to cope.