Sebald - a true literary descendant of Proust

Following my own summer-reading-list suggestions from yesterday, took pb of W.G. Sebold's "Austerlitz" to the beach - not typical beach reading (though woman in nearby chair was reading the daunting Wolf Hall) - yet wherever and whenever you read it, Austerlitz is an astonishing book. I remember only the plot outline, which as in most Sebold books is not really the point, and I remember that it is more ambitious than his earlier collections, which are really collections of stories or essays or whatever we would call his work, built around a single theme, but Austerlitz is the closest he ever came to writing a traditional novel, yet it's traditional only in that it has a central character (the eponymous A.) and over the course of the novel we learn his life story. Sebold comes as close as any late-20th-century writer to capturing the mood of Proust, in the way in which he establishes moments or memory, observation, or insight and then lets his thoughts follow that insight across a long, unspooling strand - it's not free association but carefully guided association - but for Proust it's a literary mission to pull together the strands of his own life, to understand his past in the search for "lost time," but for Sebald it's not his past he's in search of but a hidden past of our culture. Austerlitz, typical of Sebald, begins in a strange and somewhat forgotten locale - in this case Antwerp - where the narrator meets the title character in the waiting room of the railway station, begins a long discussion of the architecture of the station and then moves on (in subsequent random meetings) to discussions of the strangeness of Belgian architecture and design, including a visit to a former prisoner compound and fortification and a discourse on the Palace of Justice - then a later meeting between the two in a train station in London. Railroads - another link between Sebald and Proust (and another Asperger-like syndrome, perhaps?). As this novel unfolds, we come to see that Sebald is exploring all of European history, its greatness, its ruins, and ultimately the horrors and guild of World War II. Every one off the passages in Austerlitz is strange and disconcerting, and you might think he's making up these scenes and locales and bits of history - but he does include photos, most of which look like post cards you could pick up in a junk shop - to give a patina of reality, one of the edges and odd dualities of this very odd and haunting novel.