Vertigo

About this book

The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo W. G. Sebalds first novel never before translated into English is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebaldthe acknowledged master of memorys uncanninesstakes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebalds 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 ghostsKafka Stendhal Casanova. In four dizzying sections the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo into that "swimming of the head " as Websters 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."