Sent East
James Wood
In the summer of 1967, a man who remains unnamed but who resembles the author W.G. Sebald is visiting Belgium. At the Centraal Station in Antwerp, he sees a fellow traveller, with fair, curiously wavy hair, who is wearing heavy walking boots, workman’s trousers made of blue calico and a well-made but antiquated jacket. He is intently studying the room and taking notes. This is Jacques Austerlitz. The two men fall into conversation, have dinner at the station restaurant and talk into the night. Austerlitz is a voluble scholar – he explicates the slightly grotesque display of colonial confidence represented by Antwerp’s Centraal Station, and talks generally about the history of fortification. It is often our mightiest projects, he suggests, which most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.
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Vol. 33 No. 19 · 6 October 2011 » James Wood » Sent East
pages 15-18 | 4114 words