Two clocks mark our first encounter with Jacques Austerlitz, the protagonist of W.G. Sebald’s final novel which was launched into the new millennium in 2001 like a sombre coda to the history of the 21st century and a profession of faith in the art of the 21st century. A narrator, who is hard to distinguish from Sebald himself, approaches Austerlitz in Antwerp Centraal Station, intrigued by one of the few travellers who isn’t staring apathetically into space in the Salle des pas perdus, but paying close attention to the station’s monumental architecture while making sketches, notes and taking photographs.

“When will books be written like catalogues?” was Walter Benjamin asking himself in One Way Street. Surely the two eccentric French copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, brought to life by Flaubert to gather the knowledge of the World, would have agreed.  

Writers are often asked how they write: where, what with. I don’t know if Sebald ever answered, but if I had to imagine his reply I would say that he wrote inside a chamber of silence.

W.G. Sebald’s life and work confront every biographer with the deliberate fictionalization of everyday events in the author’s biography—a constant theme in his postmodernist, semi-documentary and autobiographical writing. Five key events from his inner as well as outer lives are described, ranging from the bombing of Germany at his birth to his relationships with his father and maternal grandfather and finally to his emigration and a key biographical event for the beginning of his writing.

The following article attempts to bring together several approaches to W.G. Sebald’s work, the relevance of which appears to respond to resonances that evoke many of the notions developed by literary and cultural theory in recent decades. Memory, image, temporality, travel and intertextuality comprise a small range of topics that give a good indication of the kaleidoscopic vitality of this German writer.