The Friends Book Group will read and discuss Austerlitz, a novel by the late German novelist W. G. Sebald, on September 27 at 7:30 in the Hydrangea Room of the Community Center.
In Austerlitz, a four-year old Jewish boy, Jacques Austerlitz, arrives in Wales at the start of World War II where he is adopted by a Welsh Methodist minister. He was brought to England on a Kinderstransport from his native Czechoslovakia.
Decades after the war, his memories of his life with his birth family return piecemeal, and he begins a quest to understand the circumstances that led to his being saved.
Austerlitz is unique in its integration of photographs with fiction, which blurs the genre. Sebald himself called his work "documentary fiction." Mark O’Connell, writing in The New Yorker, says Sebald’s "books occupy an unsettled, disputed territory on the border of fiction and fact, and this generic ambivalence is mirrored in the protean movements of his prose."
Copies of Austerlitz are currently available at the library. If you find that they are all checked out, please place a hold. 301-891-7259