Vertigo
Vertigo
By W.G. Sebald
Translated by Michael Hulse
“For all its dark contents and burden of undeclared grief, Vertigo is dizzyingly light and transparent.”—Benjamin Kunkel, The Village Voice
“In Sebald's writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death... beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald's strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate
“Few writers make one more aware of the seductive powers of language.”—Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books
Vertigo is the marvelous first novel by W.G. Sebald: "The most exciting, and most mysteriously sublime, of contemporary European writers" (James Wood, The New Republic). An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys across Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader line by line into a dizzying web of history, biography, autobiography, legends, literature, and―most perilously―memories.
Paperback
272 pages
New Directions, 2016
Originally published in 1990
5.4 x 0.8 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780811226165
Travel, Biography, History