Austerlitz

At their next meeting at a brasserie, Austerlitz tells the narrator about the new Bibliothèque Nationale, which was built where the Bastiani circus tent once stood. The narrative follows Austerlitz’s time in 1950s Paris:

The new library is a complex of four 22-story glass buildings ordered by President François Mitterrand as a monument to himself. It is the antithesis of the old building, which was welcoming and conducive to scholarship. It’s difficult to reach the building, and when you do, you must ascend a steep flight of stairs and cross a massive, exposed esplanade (pictured), only to then be forced to descend via moving walkway to the entrance, where you’re searched by security guards.

Austerlitz feels that, at every turn, the new library obstructs his search for traces of his father. He works from the public reading room, looking out at the massive courtyard sunken in the esplanade, which contains 100 full-grown pines transplanted from Normandy. Occasionally, Austerlitz glimpses one of the two squirrels that were installed in the artificial forest in the hope they would form a colony. Sometimes, birds tricked by the mirror image of the pines collide with the glass in a muffled thump.