Vertigo

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." A unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again the readers' guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid the restless literary ghosts of Kafka, Stendhal, and Casanova. In four dizzying sections, Sebald, one of the most acclaimed European writers of our time, plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head" as Webster defines it A first-person narrative describes a journey from Italy during Napoleon's invasion to a Bavarian village, drawing in the memories of notable persons such as Franz Kafka and Casanova.