Vertigo

W G Sebald

Editions

Review

This is in fact Sebald’s first book, although it is the third to be published. Using the same extraordinary, highly personalized mix of travel narrative, fiction, history - and a variety of other genres – as he used in The Emigrants pbk £7.99 and The Rings Of Saturn pbk £7.99, he embarks on what may be described as an exploration of memory. From his typically unpredictable starting-point – 17-year-old Stendahl crossing the Alps with Napoleon’s army in 1800 – he finds his way, via Casanova in Venice, Kafka in Italy, to the village where he was born.

Sebald’s prose in this book is, as ever, a delight: exact, rhythmic and incisive. The final chapter on the village of  “W.” is particularly beautiful, as you begin to realise that the whole book – however seemingly remote from the author, and surprising – has been an autobiographical quest, or creation. - review by Johnny de Falbe

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