Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
Ghost Story
By Gabriele Annan
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bill
Random House, 298 pp., $25.95
Nearly all the photographs are either melancholy or sinister or both, even when they are architectural—which in the case of Austerlitz most of them are. Interiors of railway stations, fortresses, hotels, municipal buildings, libraries, conservatories draw one into eerie spaces somewhere between Escher's surreal flights of stairs and Piranesi's imaginary prisons. The prose corroborates the impression: in the disused ladies' waiting room at London's Liverpool Street Station, for instance,
Review, 2560 words
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