Watch: The Places of Austerlitz

Read special 'Literature' issue of Source at www.source.ie/app Win books at www.facebook.com/SOURCEphoto WG Sebald's last novel, like its predecessors, is illustrated with mysterious photographs. Sebald scholar Jonathan Long visits locations featured in the book and explores how the photographs correspond to (or conceal) reality.

On a gloomy December Friday I sat down in the kitchen and began to read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. About five hours later I finished the book. Apart from to make a couple of cups of coffee, I did not move from my chair with a view to the courtyard of our Berlin apartment until the book was finished. It is a powerful piece of work, a novel that brings elements of memoir and travelogue to create a book that is about place, about memory and imagination, and about the stories to be found both within and without.

One thing that strikes the reader of Austerlitz are the images, black and white photographs very deliberately placed at specific moments within the text that, by their very existence, help to blur the line between fact and fiction. The film from SOURCE Photographic Review above follows scholar Jonathan Long as he explores the locations of the images, as well as speaking to those who helped Sebald source, select and layout the images.

SOURCE Photographic Review is a quarterly print and digital magazine published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Austerlitz film was written and directed by Richard West. Full film credits are on the Youtube page.