Customer Reviews

Vertigo

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WG Sebald is proving to be one of the most consistly unique, interesting writers today. This his third translated book (though his actual first novel) will undoubtedly sear his stamp of genius on the minds of serious readers around the world.

Simply stated, Sebald writes about the way the mind works - whether retracing synaptical strands that are memories, observing the world thru the windows of trams and trains as though watching an art film, or meandering through the visual stimuli that force us to confront fugitive connections with history or past lives or real but buried tragedies. Reading Sebald is like wandering through early morning or gloaming mists: what we see or hear or think is relative to how our minds process this information.

Sebald is obsessed with travel and with any obsession he delivers the fear of strange places as they bear witness to personal history related to actual history. He populates his travels with people so real they almost extend a touching hand while at the same time he places legends such as Stendhal, Kafka, Tiepelo in such vivid form that they seem of our time.

The rest of what Sebald does so wondrously is the magic that happens between writer and reader, and to give that away in description would be robbing the new reader of the pleasures of an intensely gratifying affair. This is writing at its best and I think the title "Vertigo" also describes the feeling of closing the final page of this pregnant journey.

"Vertigo," the third of W. G. Sebald's works to appear in English translation, is a disorienting narrative that conflates history, memory, dream, and imagination. The result is another literary tour de force from the author of "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn," a remarkable work that is difficult to classify, but reinforces Sebald's deserved reputation as one of Europe's most original and preeminent contemporary writers.

"Vertigo" begins with an historical figure, in this case Marie Henri Beyle, better known to literary history as Stendhal. In the opening section ("Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet"), our third person narrator relates certain of the amorous adventures of Beyle during his travels in Italy, beginning with his first arrival in that country at the age of seventeen as a soldier in Napoleon's army. The year is 1800 and the historical record is drawn from Beyle's own notes of his experience, written more than three decades later at the age of 53. As if foreshadowing the vertiginous unreliability of the narrative to follow, the narrator (Sebald?) relates as follows: "The notes in which the 53-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection."

The third person narrative shifts, in the second section, to a first person relation of travels in Austria and Italy by our narrator beginning in the year 1980. It is an unreliable narrative, confounding dream and reality, past and present, in a text that seems to have a mysterious, underlying hermeticism. Thus, while aimlessly wandering the dark streets of Vienna, the narrator often thought he saw someone he knew walking ahead of me. "On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognized the poet Dante, banished from his hometown on pain of being burned at the stake." Similarly, in the dark, misty, maze-like streets of Venice, "there sat, and in fact very nearly lay, a man in a worn green loden coat whom I immediately recognized as King Ludwig II of Bavaria."

In a remarkable, resonant passage that writes another layer on the palimpsest of literary renderings of Venice, Sebald writes: "As you enter into the heart of that city, you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment. Scarcely has someone made an appearance than he has quit the stage by another exit. These brief exhibitions are of an almost theatrical obscenity and at the same time have an air of conspiracy about them, into which one is drawn against one's will. If you walk behind someone in a deserted alleyway, you have only to quicken your step slightly to instill a little fear into the person you are following. And equally, you can feel like a quarry yourself. Confusion and ice-cold terror alternate."

In Venice, too, the narrator muses on the dark history of the Doge's Palace, reflecting, in particular on the early nineteenth century writings of the German Franz Grillparzer and on one of the victims of the harsh justice carried out in that palace, Giacomo Casanova. Grillparzer, a lawyer, ponders that "the resolutions passed here by the Council of State must be mysterious, immutable and harsh." It is a thought that brings to mind Kafka's "The Trial", among other things, and it is not surprising that, in the next breath, the reader learns that Casanova's memoir of his imprisonment in the Doge's Palace was first published in, of all places, Prague.

From here, the narrative shifts once again to the third person, this time in a section entitled "Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva." It is, again, a purportedly historical narrative of Franz Kafka's trip in 1913 from Prague to Vienna and then on to Italy, where he visits Venice, Verona and Riva, a city on the shores of Lake Garda. Kafka's journeys mirror those of the narrator in the second section of the book and the dreamlike repetitions, doublings, doppelgangers which re-occur throughout "Vertigo" provide a deeply entwined narrative for the careful reader. Thus, in a passage that, in some sense, is a trope for the entire text, Kafka stands on the porch of the Pellegrini Chapel in Verona, a place where the narrator himself related he had stood in 1980 in the previous section of the book: "When Doctor K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner."

From Kafka's 1913 experiences, the final section of Vertigo relates the narrator's return in November, 1987, to his childhood home in the Tyrol. It is the most introspective and personal section of "Vertigo," but still remains tied to the text that has gone before, resonating with themes, enigmas and uncertainties that make "Vertigo" a puzzle-palace of literary and historical renderings.

I could say much more about "Vertigo," tie many more passages and themes together, make a plethora of textual allusions and connections. This would do nothing more, however, than demonstrate the richness of Sebald's imagination, the density of his writing, the dream-like dislocations and uncertainties of his original and unclassifiable literary enterprise. If you read no other book this year, read "Vertigo" or "The Emigrants" or "The Rings of Saturn"; just be sure to read at least one of W. G. Sebald's books because you will not be disappointed.

The late W.G. Sebald wrote books of uncommon beauty, but, much to his credit, they are books that are extremely difficult to classify. Are they fiction, biography, memoir? Yes, they are all these and much, much more. When reading a book written by W.G. Sebald, one has to remember that what he doesn't write is just as important as what he does; his is truly a "sound of silence" in which the seemingly endless repetitions and comparisons conjure up more variations on theme than anyone could possible catalogue.

"Vertigo" is a book that consists of four sections that are not completely related to one another and would have made just as much sense (or so it seems) if told in a different order. These various sections tell of journies made to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to Sebald's childhood home in the mountains of southern Germany. The journies fold and refold themselves into one another, becoming a part of one another until we're not quite sure which is which. The travels of Sebald echo the travels of Kafka, while the travels of Kafka echo those of Stendhal. Sebald, himself, encounters Dante in the Duomo, King Ludwig II on a vaporetto and the daughter of James I at Heidelberg Station. What is real? What is not? Sebald never gives us any clear-cut answers, for that was never the purpose of his journey, nor of this book.

The first section of "Vertigo" is a third-person biographical sketch of a nineteenth-century Napoleonic soldier named Beyle and it begins with Napoleon's crossing of the Alps into Austrian Italy. Sebald has, himself, perused Beyle's own journals for the material that make up this sketch. It is to Sebald's credit, at least in my estimation, that he never mentions the fact that Beyle is the birth name of the French novelist, Stendhal. Sebald had far too much respect for our own intelligence to "spell it all out."

The important questions raised in this section are: "How reliable is memory?" and, "Are memories, even when they conflict with facts, still reliable indicators of personal experience?" Sebald, of course, is dwelling on his own cultural heritage and the fact that the "official" history of Germany is one that has been written and rewritten in an effort to make it more palatable to those not directly involved.

In the second section of the book, Sebald moves to the first-person as a nameless, faceless narrator (who both is and is not, Sebald) travels over the same landscape as did Stendhal: a garden in Verona, the Duomo in Milan, the mist-shrouded Doge's Palace in Venice, the winding alleys of Vienna. Here, the narrator seems to be pursued by ghosts, the ghost of Dante, Casanova and King Ludwig of Bavaria. "Is it possible," he seems to be asking, "to endure that which is totally unendurable?"

The third section is one of the most imaginative and, shifting to the third person once again, Sebald narrates Franz Kafka's 1913 journey from Prague to Riva, Italy on the beautiful Lago di Garda. This is a gorgeous, almost playful recapitulation of the second section and it should be read quietly, carefully and slowly in order to get the most out of it.

The fourth and final section details Sebald's 1987 visit to his own birthplace in Germany. For Sebald, being German meant carrying something incurable, something akin to Stendhal's syphilis. Even the German countryside seems to have taken on a surreal quality. Its well-built houses with their sparkling clean windows and neat woodpiles bear no resemblance to the Germany Sebald left so many years ago. As Sebald contemplates this antiseptic cleansing of Germany and his own inability to escape his "Germanness," the vertigo of the book returns to haunt him. Has his generation been the victim or the perpetrator of a massive swindle of denial? Have they bartered away their innocence for nothing?

Although "Vertigo" is a more abstract and difficult book than Sebald's masterpiece, "The Emigrants" (which is also composed of four sections), the two books do depict the same subject matter...Germans who must, but cannot, face their own Germanness. Emigrants who have not only left their country of origin, but have lost it as well. People who are, of necessity, on the verge of a quiet, introspective madness. "While it might have been rare for a man to be driven insane," writes Sebald, "little was required to tip the balance."

Sebald's closing warning to his readers is also an echo, an echo of the warning sign found in the London Underground: "Mind the gap." Mind the gap between truth and lies, between fiction and reality, between history and propaganda, between what we know and what we only think we know, between forgetting and remembering.

"Vertigo" is surely a book worth remembering.

If you're not familiar with Sebald's work, you should read his 'Rings of Saturn' or 'The Emigrants' first. This book, although similar in reflective style, is a bit more introspective than the other two. 'Vertigo' is a kind of a travelogue of the author, and I use the term 'travelogue' loosely. His memories of various places intersect with the travels and events of other people in different periods of time, namely Stendhal, Kafka and Cassanova. This novel is really hard to summarize, and I don't think one should. The most rewarding part of reading this intellectually kinky little book is trying to make heads and tails of it in the end. If you want fast-paced storyline, or exotic occurrences, look elsewhere. But this man's slow, hypnotic prose alone was enough to captivate me til the end. I believe Sebald is a pioneer of contemporary fiction. He bends forms, defies categorization. He subverts fictional truths with real truths and vice-versa, and if it takes putting a picture of his real passport in the book for the sake of documentation, he will do that. (Which he does.) I can't wait to read more of his stuff.

Although it as only now come out in English, "Vertigo" preceded "The Emigrants" and "Rings of Saturn", and was the first book in which Sebald developed his unique prose style. There are four sections of varying length. The first is devoted to the French writer Stendhal crossing the Alps with Napoleon; the following one shows us the familiar Sebald persona in Italy; the third is about Kafka's trip to the same country; the last and most moving one has the narrator return to his native Bavaria. To those who know Sebald, no more needs to be said. To the others, one might try to give an idea by saying that Sebald's style could perhaps be explained as a kind of civilized interior monologue; it always implies the awareness that writing cannot imitate the way we really think, yet it uses the associations that come to the narrator's mind to make the texutre of the narrative immensely satisfying and touching.

"Vertigo," the third of W. G. Sebald's works to appear in English translation, is a disorienting narrative that conflates history, memory, dream, and imagination. The result is another literary tour de force from the author of "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn," a remarkable work that is difficult to classify, but reinforces Sebald's deserved reputation as one of Europe's most original and preeminent contemporary writers.

"Vertigo" begins with an historical figure, in this case Marie Henri Beyle, better known to literary history as Stendhal. In the opening section ("Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet"), our third person narrator relates certain of the amorous adventures of Beyle during his travels in Italy, beginning with his first arrival in that country at the age of seventeen as a soldier in Napoleon's army. The year is 1800 and the historical record is drawn from Beyle's own notes of his experience, written more than three decades later at the age of 53. As if foreshadowing the vertiginous unreliability of the narrative to follow, the narrator (Sebald?) relates as follows: "The notes in which the 53-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection."

The third person narrative shifts, in the second section, to a first person relation of travels in Austria and Italy by our narrator beginning in the year 1980. It is an unreliable narrative, confounding dream and reality, past and present, in a text that seems to have a mysterious, underlying hermeticism. Thus, while aimlessly wandering the dark streets of Vienna, the narrator often thought he saw someone he knew walking ahead of me. "On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognized the poet Dante, banished from his hometown on pain of being burned at the stake." Similarly, in the dark, misty, maze-like streets of Venice, "there sat, and in fact very nearly lay, a man in a worn green loden coat whom I immediately recognized as King Ludwig II of Bavaria."

In a remarkable, resonant passage that writes another layer on the palimpsest of literary renderings of Venice, Sebald writes: "As you enter into the heart of that city, you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment. Scarcely has someone made an appearance than he has quit the stage by another exit. These brief exhibitions are of an almost theatrical obscenity and at the same time have an air of conspiracy about them, into which one is drawn against one's will. If you walk behind someone in a deserted alleyway, you have only to quicken your step slightly to instill a little fear into the person you are following. And equally, you can feel like a quarry yourself. Confusion and ice-cold terror alternate."

In Venice, too, the narrator muses on the dark history of the Doge's Palace, reflecting, in particular on the early nineteenth century writings of the German Franz Grillparzer and on one of the victims of the harsh justice carried out in that palace, Giacomo Casanova. Grillparzer, a lawyer, ponders that "the resolutions passed here by the Council of State must be mysterious, immutable and harsh." It is a thought that brings to mind Kafka's "The Trial", among other things, and it is not surprising that, in the next breath, the reader learns that Casanova's memoir of his imprisonment in the Doge's Palace was first published in, of all places, Prague.

From here, the narrative shifts once again to the third person, this time in a section entitled "Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva." It is, again, a purportedly historical narrative of Franz Kafka's trip in 1913 from Prague to Vienna and then on to Italy, where he visits Venice, Verona and Riva, a city on the shores of Lake Garda. Kafka's journeys mirror those of the narrator in the second section of the book and the dreamlike repetitions, doublings, doppelgangers which re-occur throughout "Vertigo" provide a deeply entwined narrative for the careful reader. Thus, in a passage that, in some sense, is a trope for the entire text, Kafka stands on the porch of the Pellegrini Chapel in Verona, a place where the narrator himself related he had stood in 1980 in the previous section of the book: "When Doctor K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner."

From Kafka's 1913 experiences, the final section of Vertigo relates the narrator's return in November, 1987, to his childhood home in the Tyrol. It is the most introspective and personal section of "Vertigo," but still remains tied to the text that has gone before, resonating with themes, enigmas and uncertainties that make "Vertigo" a puzzle-palace of literary and historical renderings.

I could say much more about "Vertigo," tie many more passages and themes together, make a plethora of textual allusions and connections. This would do nothing more, however, than demonstrate the richness of Sebald's imagination, the density of his writing, the dream-like dislocations and uncertainties of his original and unclassifiable literary enterprise. If you read no other book this year, read "Vertigo" or "The Emigrants" or "The Rings of Saturn"; just be sure to read at least one of W. G. Sebald's books because you will not be disappointed.

Having never read a book by W.G. Sebald before, I bought this novel on a trip to London and began reading it on the long flight back to the States. The airline seated me next to a friendly, intelligent and beautiful woman, so I don't think I read more than eight pages or so during the flight. When I finished the book a few days later, I was stunned to discover that the route the narrator walks across central London near the end is EXACTLY the route I walked through that same area just a few hours before buying this book.

I mention this coincidence not solely because of narcissism, but because such coindences, such unexpected correspondences, such synchronicities, are the raw materials from which Sebald's books are made.

"Vertigo" is the first and most difficult of Sebald's four novels, and it may also be the most profound. The first example of his trademark form, the travel narrative as psychological and philosophical exploration, the book moves from London to Venice to the German alps and covers a range of subjects from the paintings of Pisanello to the loves of Stendhal, working in meditations on the treachery of memory, the fragility of identity, the struggle to find meaning in history (both personal and national)... Sebald's works are so intellectually rich that summary descriptions of them can only sound banal. Read the book and see for yourself.

This account of wanderings on both sides of the Alps perfectly captures that mixture of familiarity and strangeness, fascination mingled with isolation, and the sense of rubbing shoulders with a checkered history, that is the experience of a solitary traveler who takes his time. Sebald's narrator is a lot more sensitive than most, prone to nervous fears and intense but unconsummated attractions. By interspersing his own narrative with accounts of Stendahl (referred to only by his real name, Marie Henri Beyle), Casanova, and Kafka (Dr. K.) in the same parts, Sebald adds layers of resonance to his own experience, while questioning the nature of memory itself. The layers of thought, the ungoverned spirallings of the mind, which mirror and surpass the narrator's impulsive wanderings, are the true subject of this book.

I have to admit, though, that VERTIGO disappointed me after reading the same author's AUSTERLITZ. The memories that lie at the heart of the rose for this particular narrator are those of a child in a Bavarian village just after the German defeat in 1945. While they are vivid, they do not have the power of the Holocaust memories of the earlier book, nor is this one man's experience so easily seen as a symbol of the malaise afflicting an entire culture. I was convinced by the suggestion of a couple of other reviewers on this site that Sebald's German nationality itself is felt as something akin to an endemic disorder -- but this does not come over with anything like the inescapable strength that it does in the later and greater novel.

Let's start at the beginning: W.G.Sebald's work is frankly addictive. Beginning as he always does with a date and an event (Napoleon crossing into Italy in the 1790s) the reader is soon taken in turn by Stendal (Beyle the hussar and later commisariat bureaucrat) into the Italy of dreams and walkers. The book takes you to high places,leaves you dizzy with brillant verbal play and sends you down again only to reclimb a new thought or gesture. Kafka taking a water cure is here as is Stendal posturing with Byron. And all the while Sebald's amalgram of fact and fiction sweeps the reader along. Strong meat for some, a delight for many.

Sebald published his first, well, novel, in 1990. He invented a new genre of literature, a kind of combination of travel writing and literary plus historical essay, with a minimal addition of 'plot'.
The travels are in time and in space. The space in Vertigo is Northern Italy with extensions into Austria and Bavaria. The book at first glance seems to be consisting of four stories, but that is a misconception. Sebald's travels happen in the 80s of the 20th century, and injected into the travel narrative are two texts about the lives of Stendhal and Kafka, both focusing on Norther Italy, first during the Napoleonic wars, then during the pre-WW1 period. Other literary names playing a part are Herbeck (a walk in Vienna), Grillparzer (travel diary to Venice), Casanova (escape from Venice prison), Werfel (visiting Kafka in hospital), Ehrenstein (Vienna excursion with Kafka).
The book deals with the themes that Sebald would later develop further in his other books, i.e. memory, resp. the process of remembering, and exile. The narrative does have elements of a story: the narrator feels stalked by two young men when he is in Italy in 1980. When he comes again 7 years later, he learns about a case of two serial killers, educated young men from 'good families', who had committed a series of brutal murders 'in the name of' mad King Ludwig. The narrator has his passport lost by an Italian hotel, he gets mugged in Milano when he goes to the Consulate for a replacement. He travels to his home town in Bavaria, which he has not seen since a long time, and revisits places and memories from childhood.
An anecdote on exile: during Kafka's visit to Lake Garda in 1913, the stolen Mona Lisa is reported to be found in the place of an Italian thief, who had tried to liberate her from her unvoluntary exile in Paris. (Sebald reads this in newspaper archives when he researches Kafka's trip.) Which links Sebald to my other recent addiction, Patrick O'Brian, who tells us in his Picasso biography, that Pablo P. had been a suspect for the theft of the painting, when he was in exile in Paris.