Austerlitz

"This is an incredibly beautiful book. Sebald was a really interesting German writer, and I think this is his masterpiece. He’s interesting because he blows away genre. You read his books and you’re not sure at all whether it is fiction, non-fiction, travelogue, memoir, art history or urbanism. But you are absolutely gripped by its extraordinary melancholy and powerful prose. It completely grips you. Austerlitz incorporates one man’s journey across Europe and his encounters with people on the way. But you know what: I cannot sum up Austerlitz . I refuse to sum it up. It refuses to be summarised. What I will say about it is that I read it in the English translation, and then I read it in German, and I was absolutely amazed because it has the feeling even in German of being a book in translation. It has a cadence to it which is really intriguing, and which is something to do with being a book about Europe. So it doesn’t fit into a genre, and doesn’t really fit into any particular language. It isn’t at all challenging. I think it’s a really approachable book. It’s a book that is ambitious but not pretentious. What Sebald did for me was to say that a particular voice was allowed. That voice was very internal, very quiet and credible across a whole piece of writing. I think I learnt that entirely from reading Sebald."

"My personal definition of great: When finishing a book, do I want to applaud, then throw it up in the air and catch it? Yes, to these three moving and profound books."