Sebald is a true original - even if, as is possible, he hitches his
vision to a Germanic tradition of reflective illustrated travelogue
unknown to this reviewer. His cadenced, melancholy prose,
obsessively and elegantly probing the past, is reminiscent of
Proust. Though claiming to be adrift on life's flow, ignorant of
the true significance of the historical (Stendahl, Kafka, Casanova,
Grunewald) and autobiographical episodes he seamlessly weaves
together, he makes his reader feel privileged with miraculous
insight - like a blind butterfly-catcher whose every other swoop of
the net rescues a strange and colourful species from oblivion.
Footloose in northern Italy, he expresses a tragic yearning for the
contentment that slips through our fingers as we age. Then the
focus narrows to an astonishing pilgrimage back to his own rural
south German childhood, oddly concluding with an epiphany of
Pepys's London, ablaze in the Great Fire. A masterpiece,
heartbreaking and profound, at the outermost limits of what
literature (fact or fiction?) can achieve - and beautifully
translated. (Kirkus UK)
At moments when reality shows itself to be unstable or uncanny, we experience a form of vertigo. This is further complicated when we try to transform experience into writing, and fact clashes with memory. Vertigo explores this theme through four stories and four journeys. With Stendhal we travel through the unreliable and painful recollections of an inglorious military career. With Kafka we travel to Italy and an unsuccessful bid to regain physical and mental well-being. Through these journeys and two by the unnamed narrator – one to Bavaria to revisit the places shaped by childhood memories - Sebald examines the unreliability of memory, the intensity of childhood experience and the dizzying unknowability of the past. Using Sebald’s own mixture of personal narrative, investigation, report, quotation (both textual and pictorial) and meditation, Vertigo is a wonderful journey into the human mind and its methods of mediating reality and the past.
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