Austerlitz

The narrator, who remains unidentified throughout the book, recounts a series of encounters he had with a man named Jacques Austerlitz during the narrator’s frequent trips from England to Belgium in the 1960s; these meetings with Austerlitz occurred over three decades, spanning to 1996.

The narrator begins his story: Back in 1967, he falls ill upon arriving by train to Centraal Station in Antwerp. After resting in a park, he visits Antwerp’s new nocturama, which contains an exotic collection of nocturnal animals. There appears in the text the first of the black-and-white photographs that are interspersed throughout the novel: four cropped close-ups of eyes, belonging to two nocturnal animals and two people. As the animals in the nocturama peer at the narrator with the penetrating gaze of a philosopher, he wonders whether the zookeepers turn on the lights at night so the animals can sleep.

The narrator’s memories from the nocturama blend with those from the salle des pas perdus, the concourse of the Centraal Station, to which he returned after the nocturama. In the twilight, under the 60-meter-high dome of the concourse, the few travelers look like one of the species from the nocturama, “the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland” (24).

One man in the concourse stands out because he’s photographing and making notes about the concourse. He has wavy hair and wears sturdy, aged clothes. The narrator approaches the man, Jacques Austerlitz, who readily answers his questions about his sketches. The two talk for hours in the station restaurant. Austerlitz explains King Leopold commissioned the station as a monument to Belgium’s newfound colonial prosperity in the 19th century. In the frieze inspired by the Roman Pantheon, symbols of industry and capital replace the Roman gods.

Standing above everything in the station—in the place once occupied by the figure of the holy emperor in ancient Rome—is a giant clock, a symbol of time. Austerlitz argues time has replaced divine authority: “all travelers ha[ve] to look up at the clock and [are] obliged to adjust their activities to its demands” (29). As they part, Austerlitz wonders how many workers died from mercury and cyanide fumes in the construction of the station’s giant mirrors—a question that in the text is left in French (in which the two men converse).

At their meeting the next day on the promenade by the Schelde River, Austerlitz mentions a painting by Lucas van Valckenborch depicting ice skaters on the river during the Little Ice Age in the 16th century. Austerlitz feels as if the moment depicted never ended; that the ice skater who has just fallen is condemned to fall again and again in a timeless loop.

Austerlitz tells the narrator he has spent his life studying monumental architecture, with a focus on railway stations. He’s learned that, contrary to their intimidating appearance, the grandest buildings betray the greatest degree of humanity’s insecurity. For example, in the 17th century, fortress design culminated in the star-shaped dodecagon, which was regarded as the perfect defensive structure. However, such fortresses were ineffective because their architects ignored three crucial facts: The biggest fortresses attract the largest forces, betray their weak points, and remain static in an ever-changing world. Even after a French army used newly developed mortars to level Antwerp’s star-shaped fortress in 1832, the city decided to build another fortress. To Austerlitz, this decision exemplifies the illogical attachment people have to an established model, despite evidence of its fatal flaws.

Austerlitz believes no one honestly prefers a monumental building to something smaller, such as a cottage, because lurking behind the monument there is the seed of its destruction:

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins (36).