Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald's one novel about a personality

"Austerlitz" is unique, or nearly so, in W.G. Sebald's work, i that it is truly about a character, a characters (the eponymous Austerlitz) albeit who is much like the typical Sebald first-person narrator - obsessive, weirdly inquisitive, devoted to research and arcana, drawn to the ruins of (mostly) European history, fascinated by grand but decayed buildings and by (largely) outmoded means of transportation (especially trains, but also dirigibles, ferries I think?). In the other Sebald works I can recall he describes in first person his own wanderings and mental meanderings, but Austerlitz he builds the novel mainly on his encounters with A. and the stories that A. relates about his life and about his past, as the two men either sit for hours in one of the Sebald-like settings (a railroad waiting room, a lobby of an ancient grand hotel) or walk through odd neighborhoods (the walk to Greenwich from London particularly striking - I, too, have been to Greenwhich and was struck by its oddity as a riverside village near London with its observatory and vast parkland - and the speculation that provokes on the very nature of time and boundaries). As the character of A. unfolds over the course of the novel, we see him as increasingly sad, isolate, and wounded - after a horrible childhood, a war orphan in a very cold, unfeeling Welsh household, he finds at last some comfort and solace with the family of his servant (fag, as the call it in the U.K.), whose family matches A. for arcana and strangeness - the old uncle who spends the day perambulating around his room, another who was a Darwin disciple and has hug collections of moths and other creatures - but also a loving family, and he actually builds a friendship with the young man, until the man - Gerald (?) - whose only great pleasure is attaining heights and takes up flying - dies in crash. A. is alone - spends years at a tedious job, then retires and tries to write, but develops a hysteric aversion the act of writing and even to words, to letters - narrator Sebald visits him at this stage in his small, spartan East End home. Obviously, Sebald novels do not summarize well nor are they meant to - they are journeys in themselves, and in a future post I'll try to capture the essence of the Sebald "journey," and how Sebald's use of association differs radically from that of Joyce and Proust - but is at times worthy of comparison with these two great titans of 20th-century literature.