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.»
