Synopses & Reviews
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."
Review
One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed. Anita Brookner
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For all its dark contents and burden of undeclared grief, Vertigo is dizzyingly light and transparent. Spectator
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[Sebald's writing] is very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful. This German who has lived in England for thirty years is one of the most exciting, and most mysteriously sublime, of contemporary European writers. Washington Post
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[A]n intriguing peregrination through time, memory, displacement...provides a first look at the author whose reputation has only continued to grow. Publishers Weekly
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Think of W. G. Sebald as memory's Einstein. -- Richard Eder
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[A]n intensely personal work, showing us Sebald's genesis as a writer, and is constantly stimulating. -- Sebastian Shakespeare
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[D]iverts and surprises at every turn, and bears the unmistakable stamp of maturity and erudition. -- Philip Landon
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Sebald is a thrilling, original writer. He makes narration a state of investigative bliss. -- W. S. Di Piero
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[A] haunting masterpiece from W. G. Sebald. Benjamin Kunkel Village Voice
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[An] exquisitely composed work. James Wood The New Republic
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Think of W. G. Sebald as memory's Einstein. Bondo Wyszpolski Redondo Beach News
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time.
About the Author
W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.