Austerlitz (Penguin Essentials)

I rested for a while on a park bench beside an aviary not far from the big cats’ house, where the lions and tigers, invisible from my vantage point and, as it struck me at the time, said Austerlitz, driven out of their minds in captivity, raised their hollow roars of lament hour after hour without ceasing.

first because it quite often took me until midnight to master a single page, and a good deal was lost in this lengthy process,

reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed,

to my surprise, Austerlitz articulated these heterogeneous German compounds unhesitatingly and without the slightest trace of an accent

I see Victor Hugo’s sombre pen-and-ink drawings of the Rhine castles, and Joseph Mallord Turner sitting on a folding stool not far from the murderous town of Bacharach, swiftly painting his watercolours; I see the deep waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the people of Llanwddyn submerged in them; and I see, said Austerlitz, the great army of mice, a grey hor

think of my Rhine journeys, the second of them hardly less terrifying than the first, everything becomes confused in my head:

At least, I no longer knew in what period of my life I was living as I journeyed down the Rhine valley.

towards the end of the journey he had died of consumption and was stowed in the baggage net with the rest of our belongings.

and it dawned upon me, said Austerlitz, that what I now saw going past outside the train was the original of the images that had haunted me for so many years.