The most notable effect of Sebald's style is a pervasive sense that the book is actually about something other than the eccentric preoccupations of its narrator, that there is a deeper theme that underlays the melancholic tone and obsolescent subjects. In The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, the deeper theme remains unspoken and repressed; in Austerlitz the subtext becomes text when its protagonist learns he was separated from his parents during the Holocaust.
Austerlitz shares many aspects of the Sebaldian style: a monologue about the history of fortification design, visits to nearly empty museums and towns, desolate photographs, chance encounters, and overlapping storytellers:
From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell a tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Teplitz in the early summer of 1933...
Events span a time period from the 1930s to the 1990s, and it is purposely difficult to keep track of what happens when:
I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like..
In many ways, the last half of book provides an exegesis of how to create the Sebald effect. Once Austerlitz is explicitly investigating the fate of his parents, you understand the source of his earlier obsessions. The focus on absence, inanimate objects, and personal identity makes sense.
Ultimately I prefer Sebald's more elusive and allusive books. The mystery is a large part of the appeal for me. Austerlitz's direct confrontation with the Holocaust feels too "on the nose," and the clear provenance of the photographs robs them of their enigmatic quality.
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