Vertigo [Paperback]

W. G. Sebald (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2001 | Series: New Directions Paperbook

The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time.

Vertigo, W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It is not often that books receive the universal critical acclaim with which W.G. Sebald's work in English translation has been met. Both The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn won the sort of plaudits that would enable most writers to die happy. Sebald first employed his limpid, literally entrancing style in Vertigo, which appeared in German in 1990 and then waited a decade for its English-language debut. Like The Emigrants, this earlier novel interweaves four different narratives, which cumulatively sound a single, transcendent note--in this case, that of memory.

Sebald begins with Marie Henri Beyle (better known as Stendhal), cruising through the French author's painful and unreliable recollections of his military career. Then he splices in his own voyage through Italy, allowing these historical and personal perspectives to intersect when we least expect them to. As the book develops, it returns to the same locations: Milan, Verona, Venice, and the Alps. And in the course of this fractured meandering, the reader cohabits with a haunted Franz Kafka, admires the serene beauty of the stars above Lake Garda, and ultimately returns to Sebald's home in Bavaria, where the author confronts his childhood memories.

For Sebald, a straight line is never the shortest distance between two points: he more often travels in concentric circles, or cuts wild capers from past to present. Yet the stumbling journey in Vertigo seeks to replicate the distorted and unfathomable workings of memory itself. And it succeeds to an astonishing extent, so that the acts of traveling, recalling, and writing are impossible to tell apart:

On this occasion in the midst of the holiday season, the night train from Vienna to Venice, on which in the late October of 1980 I had seen nobody except a pale-faced schoolmistress from New Zealand, was so overcrowded that I had to stand in the corridor all the way or crouch uncomfortably among suitcases and rucksacks, so that instead of drifting into sleep I slid into my memories. Or rather, the memories (at least so it seemed to me) rose higher and higher in some space outside of myself, until, having reached a certain level, they overflowed from that space into me, like water over the top of a weir.

Thus is the writer inundated. And so, happily, are his readers--those lucky enough to take the plunge. --Toby Green --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Sebald's third novel to be translated into English is in fact the German author's first novel, written before the acclaimed travel meditation, The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants. This exquisitely composed work also undertakes a disorienting, if less somber, journey through historical and personal memory. The first-person narrator travels through Europe during the 1980s, spurred on by history's ghosts and his own melancholic yearning for adventure. Having left his base in England to explore Vienna, Venice and Verona, he concludes with a bittersweet pilgrimage to his hometown in southwestern Germany. In four nonlinear chapters, the narrator sustains himself along his journey by establishing parallels with places and personages throughout history-e.g., the romantic novelist Stendhal, who led a peripatetic life as a Napoleonic soldier ("Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet"), and the ailing and sexually repressed Franz Kafka, who made mournful trips to Italy ("Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva"). Black-and-white illustrations (a detail from a Pisanello fresco, a postcard of the smoking peak of Vesuvius) provide the ironic relief. "What relation was there," the narrator asks himself in a typical moment of self-befuddlement, "between the so-called monuments of the past" and our own "vague longing" to try to connect to the future? Sebald writes elliptically, refusing to explain the intersection of seemingly irrelevant events: the narrator is fond of combing old newspapers for bits "that might well be worth retelling some time," but he is unable to resolve the purpose of his aimless quest, and allows his serenely seductive prose to lead where it will. In the last chapter, "Il ritorno in patria" (readers had better know some Italian and German, because phrases are not translated), Sebald attains a particularly fluid synthesis of intellect and sensation as the writer revisits the stunning scenery and complicated memories of his youth. In the Alpine village of W., where he has not returned for three decades, he realizes that places "which had meant so much to me in my memory... meant nothing to me now." Back in London, he has a vision of the "vertiginous depths" of the past, and hears "an echo that had almost faded away." Again translator Hulse successfully conveys Sebald's shimmering prose. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (October 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214850
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214858
• Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 2.5 x 7.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #223,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another wondrous journey! June 30, 2000

By Grady Harp HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tour de Force of History, Memory, Dream, and Imagination October 25, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

"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.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Speaking in Silence April 14, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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.