Vertigo
by Winfried Georg Sebald, W. G. Sebald
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Book Summary Information
Author: W. G. Sebald, Winfried Georg SebaldTranslator: Michael Hulse
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-10
ISBN: 0811214850
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Book Reviews of Vertigo
Book Review: In sleepless hours the urgent desire to belong to no nation
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Vertigo
Vertigo is the third novel New Directions has published 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."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
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