Austerlitz

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 21-50

Pages 51-82

Pages 83-113

Pages 114-132

Pages 133-158

Pages 159-201

Pages 202-244

Pages 245-275

Pages 276-290

Pages 291-310

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Pages 51-82Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 51-61 Summary

In the years following their Belgian meetings, the narrator visits Austerlitz whenever he travels to London. They meet at Austerlitz’s office (pictured), which is overstuffed with books and papers.

Austerlitz tells the narrator about his lifelong study of capitalist-era architecture. The characteristic elements of this capitalist style—monumentalism and order—are apparent in the classic types of buildings from this era: prisons, psychiatric institutions, courts, opera houses, stock exchanges, and railway stations (51). His interest in this field began with his preoccupation as a student with Paris’s railway stations; in his daily visits to them, Austerlitz felt a confusing mix of bliss and terrible loss.

Around this time, the narrator returns to live in his native Germany, feeling that his nine-year absence has made him a stranger in his own land (he doesn’t mention where he has been living). He writes to Austerlitz from Munich a few times but receives no response; years later, he learns Austerlitz was averse to writing to Germany. A year after his return to Germany, the narrator moves back to the UK. He becomes depressed and doesn’t attempt to contact Austerlitz.

It’s not until a strange turn of events, 20 years later in December 1996, that the narrator encounters Austerlitz again. The narrator begins developing blindness in his right eye that renders everything in the center of his vision a black crosshatching. He worries his growing blindness will prevent him from reading and writing, but he also fantasizes about how entering a world of indistinct shapes would confer a freedom from his literary compulsion.

Before Christmas, the narrator travels by train to London to see a Czech ophthalmologist. The declining section of track before his station always makes the narrator feel as if he’s descending into a columbarium. Stray snowflakes fall from the ophthalmologist’s waiting room. Recalling lines from a favorite poem, he imagines the vast matrix of London’s streets—“London a lichen mapped on mild clays and its rough circle without purpose” (56)—being steadily buried by snow.

The ophthalmologist diagnoses the narrator with a condition that only affects middle-aged men who read and write too much. The narrator leaves to wait for his train at the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, where he spots Austerlitz. Austerlitz carries the same rucksack he did 20 years prior and now seems 10 years younger than the narrator rather than 10 years older. The narrator notices Austerlitz bears an uncanny resemblance to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: Both men always carry a rucksack, have horror-stricken faces, and are prisoners to their confused emotions and unflinching rationality.

The two men immediately resume their conversation from 20 years prior. Austerlitz explains he visited the Great Eastern on impulse to tour its grand, now disused sections, including a Masonic temple built near the turn of the 19th century. Austerlitz wants to show the narrator the marble temple, in particular a gilded painting of an ark (pictured) that hangs under the star-shaped ceiling. When viewing the ark earlier that day, Austerlitz yearned for someone to listen to his story as the narrator had two decades prior. Their fortuitous encounter, says Austerlitz, indicates some kind of imperative logic.

Pages 62-74 Summary

Still at the Great Eastern Hotel, Austerlitz begins telling the narrator his life story, and the narrative turns to Austerlitz’s childhood:

Beginning in the summer of 1939, Methodist preacher Emyr Elias and his wife, Gwendolyn, raise Austerlitz from age four in the town of Bala, Wales. Their house is dreary, isolated, and always frigid. Entirely deprived of affection from his adoptive parents, Austerlitz daydreams fragments of his loving parents from his former life.

Emyr Elias is only happy after petrifying his parishioners with his Sunday sermons about the terror of the Last Judgment. Once World War II starts and the younger preachers are drafted, Austerlitz begins traveling with Emyr every Sunday for sermons around Wales. Austerlitz connects Emyr’s Methodist eschatology with scenes from their travels: Summiting a pass, Austerlitz sees an idyllic village illuminated by rays of sun in the valley below. In another village, Austerlitz and Emyr encounter a crater of mangled bodies from a bomb dropped earlier that day—God punishing the victims for failing to keep the Sabbath holy.

Austerlitz sees this Old Testament idea of divine punishment most clearly in Emyr’s home village, Llanwddyn, which was flooded to construct the Vyrnwy reservoir. Austerlitz imagines that only the righteous Emyr escaped the flood and that his family and the rest of the town remain underwater: “still down in the depths, sitting in their houses and walking along the road, but unable to speak and with their eyes opened far too wide” (70). Austerlitz becomes obsessed with Llanwddyn by looking through Emyr’s photo book of the town. Austerlitz imagines he, too, is living at the bottom of the lake, watching the rippling image of the lone stone tower on the reservoir bank.

On summer days when the heat distorts the air, Austerlitz glimpses people from the photographs of Llanwddyn. Contradicting Emyr’s belief in divine justice behind illness and death, the cobbler Evan tells Austerlitz that people who suffer unjust deaths return as flickering ghosts.

In Sunday school, Austerlitz feels he belongs in the biblical stories, not Wales. For example, he identifies with the story of Jochebed placing Moses in an ark of cattails.

Pages 75-82 Summary

Neither Emyr nor Gwendolyn ever mention anything about World War II to Austerlitz; Wales is the world to him. However, after the Allied victory, Austerlitz begins breaking his adoptive parents’ ban on visiting the cinema to watch newsreels. Around this time, Gwendolyn’s health begins deteriorating such that she’s no longer able to run the house.

In 1947, due to Gwendolyn’s illness, she and Emyr send the 12-year-old Austerlitz away to a private boarding school, Stower Grange. The teachers are mostly older, subdued, and enforce few rules; consequently, the students must fend for themselves, leaving the weaker children at the mercy of their peers. Austerlitz feels liberated in this environment because he sees school as his only means of escaping Bala. His skill in rugby insulates him from bullying, allowing him to pursue the world of books. The fantastical places he reads about combine into an ideal imaginary world to which he escapes.

When Austerlitz first returns to Bala on break, he feels he’s returned to his miserable fate. Gwendolyn has deteriorated, and neither she nor Emyr speak at all: “It seems to me now, looking back, said Austerlitz, as if they were slowly being killed by the chill in their hearts” (78). With no recourse, Gwendolyn develops the habit of coating herself in talc, and soon the entire house is suffocated by a layer of the white, greasy powder that Austerlitz describes as “arsenical horror” (79).

Austerlitz returns to Bala from Stower Grange for the second time, during a winter that freezes birds from the trees. On Christmas Day, Gwendolyn, nearing death, asks Emyr what has caused their suffering: “What was it that so darkened our world? And Emyr replies: I don’t know, dear, I don’t know” (80). She dies a few days later, and Austerlitz, looking at her body, notices that it seems to have shrunk slightly, just as Evan the cobbler said happened after death. Grief destroys Emyr, who loses his faith and is committed to a psychiatric hospital that summer.

Pages 51-82 Analysis

The structure of these pages foreshadows the belief Austerlitz expresses later in the novel, that time doesn’t move at a uniform speed. The narrator skims over the 20-year interim between his meetings with Austerlitz before then going back into detail when he encounters Austerlitz in London. This narrative decision reflects how a person sometimes experiences time constricting and moving quickly, while other times it dilates and moves slowly.

In a similar way, the stylistic choice to omit exposition of why Austerlitz was raised by adoptive parents mirrors his own ignorance of his early childhood tragedy. The book effects in the reader a version of Austerlitz’s feelings of ignorance, thereby communicating this essential piece of his character.

As Austerlitz begins recounting his life to the narrator, the biblical imagery communicates his feeling that, like Moses, he’d been evacuated from his own world into a lifeless world full of strangers. Like Noah—the sight of whose ark in the Masonic temple makes Austerlitz yearn for someone to whom to tell his story—Austerlitz escapes catastrophe. However, unlike Noah—or Moses, who also escapes death as a child—Austerlitz is alone. He has the company of neither his family and animals (as Noah does) nor his people (as Moses does). There is a tragic irony in the contrast between the miserable world to which he was sent to escape the catastrophe of World War II and the idyllic depiction of Noah’s escape from catastrophe in the painting in the Masonic temple: an “ornamental gold-painted picture of a three-story ark floating beneath a rainbow, and the dove just returning to it carrying the olive branch in her beak” (62).

Austerlitz’s childhood obsession with the drowned town of Llanwddyn hints at his feeling of exile to a lifeless world—a shadow of the real world—for a reason he can’t understand. His vision of the townspeople trapped under the cold water of the reservoir, condemned to live pale impressions of their former lives, mirrors his feeling of drowning in the lifeless house in Bala but having to continue the motions of life. His chances of escaping this world are as slim as the Llanwddyn townspeople’s chances of escaping theirs:

At night, before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy [the reservoir that destroyed the town] must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above me (71).

Austerlitz’s feeling of being starved of light is a metaphor for his starvation of love by Emyr and Gwendolyn. Austerlitz communicates the extent of the desolation he felt in their house in Bala in his description of Gwendolyn’s deathbed habit of powdering herself in talc—which spread throughout the house—as “arsenical horror” (79).