Vertigo

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Summary: A Tour de Force of History, Memory, Dream, and Imagination
Review: "Vertigo," the third of W. G. Sebald's works to appear in English translation, is a disorienting narrative that conflates history, memory, dream, and imagination. The result is another literary tour de force from the author of "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn," a remarkable work that is difficult to classify, but reinforces Sebald's deserved reputation as one of Europe's most original and preeminent contemporary writers.

"Vertigo" begins with an historical figure, in this case Marie Henri Beyle, better known to literary history as Stendhal. In the opening section ("Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet"), our third person narrator relates certain of the amorous adventures of Beyle during his travels in Italy, beginning with his first arrival in that country at the age of seventeen as a soldier in Napoleon's army. The year is 1800 and the historical record is drawn from Beyle's own notes of his experience, written more than three decades later at the age of 53. As if foreshadowing the vertiginous unreliability of the narrative to follow, the narrator (Sebald?) relates as follows: "The notes in which the 53-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection."

The third person narrative shifts, in the second section, to a first person relation of travels in Austria and Italy by our narrator beginning in the year 1980. It is an unreliable narrative, confounding dream and reality, past and present, in a text that seems to have a mysterious, underlying hermeticism. Thus, while aimlessly wandering the dark streets of Vienna, the narrator often thought he saw someone he knew walking ahead of me. "On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognized the poet Dante, banished from his hometown on pain of being burned at the stake." Similarly, in the dark, misty, maze-like streets of Venice, "there sat, and in fact very nearly lay, a man in a worn green loden coat whom I immediately recognized as King Ludwig II of Bavaria."

In a remarkable, resonant passage that writes another layer on the palimpsest of literary renderings of Venice, Sebald writes: "As you enter into the heart of that city, you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment. Scarcely has someone made an appearance than he has quit the stage by another exit. These brief exhibitions are of an almost theatrical obscenity and at the same time have an air of conspiracy about them, into which one is drawn against one's will. If you walk behind someone in a deserted alleyway, you have only to quicken your step slightly to instill a little fear into the person you are following. And equally, you can feel like a quarry yourself. Confusion and ice-cold terror alternate."

In Venice, too, the narrator muses on the dark history of the Doge's Palace, reflecting, in particular on the early nineteenth century writings of the German Franz Grillparzer and on one of the victims of the harsh justice carried out in that palace, Giacomo Casanova. Grillparzer, a lawyer, ponders that "the resolutions passed here by the Council of State must be mysterious, immutable and harsh." It is a thought that brings to mind Kafka's "The Trial", among other things, and it is not surprising that, in the next breath, the reader learns that Casanova's memoir of his imprisonment in the Doge's Palace was first published in, of all places, Prague.

From here, the narrative shifts once again to the third person, this time in a section entitled "Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva." It is, again, a purportedly historical narrative of Franz Kafka's trip in 1913 from Prague to Vienna and then on to Italy, where he visits Venice, Verona and Riva, a city on the shores of Lake Garda. Kafka's journeys mirror those of the narrator in the second section of the book and the dreamlike repetitions, doublings, doppelgangers which re-occur throughout "Vertigo" provide a deeply entwined narrative for the careful reader. Thus, in a passage that, in some sense, is a trope for the entire text, Kafka stands on the porch of the Pellegrini Chapel in Verona, a place where the narrator himself related he had stood in 1980 in the previous section of the book: "When Doctor K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner."

From Kafka's 1913 experiences, the final section of Vertigo relates the narrator's return in November, 1987, to his childhood home in the Tyrol. It is the most introspective and personal section of "Vertigo," but still remains tied to the text that has gone before, resonating with themes, enigmas and uncertainties that make "Vertigo" a puzzle-palace of literary and historical renderings.

I could say much more about "Vertigo," tie many more passages and themes together, make a plethora of textual allusions and connections. This would do nothing more, however, than demonstrate the richness of Sebald's imagination, the density of his writing, the dream-like dislocations and uncertainties of his original and unclassifiable literary enterprise. If you read no other book this year, read "Vertigo" or "The Emigrants" or "The Rings of Saturn"; just be sure to read at least one of W. G. Sebald's books because you will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: I don't get it...
Review: I had extremely high hopes for this based on reviews but it did nothing for me. I don't mind challenging reading or "nature of memory" stuff but this wandering from topic to topic reminded me of having a conversation with my 95-year-old great aunt, a likeable lady whose primary conversational gambit was the Endless Monologue.

New characters appear without introduction and disappear so quickly that I could develop no emotional reaction to them at all. Maybe that is his point, but it seemed almost arrogant for the author to assume that everything that crosses his mind is interesting.

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Summary: Read Sebald but skip this one!
Review: I read this right after a great time reading RINGS OF SATURN. Before that I got AUSTERLITZ from the library and loved it.So this one was a major disappointment coming after his other two.The only thing that saved it from an F or D grade(one star) was his chapter at the beginning on Stendahl(spelling?) who was really named something like Byre...French, experiences with women and Napoleon. I had read THE RED AND THE BLACK(Al Gore's favorite book)and found that book interesting but not enjoyable.Anyway,VERTIGO just never got through to me after the first chapter. Some descriptions of Venice, Italy, were good but mostly the author noodled about in trains and vaguely reacted to his own inner states of memory and feeling in a whiney, underwhelming way. I hope EMIGRANTS is better.

Rating:
Summary: A poor example of a modernist book
Review: Not really a novel, Vertigo mixes interesting accounts from the lives of writers such as Stendahl and Kafka with loopy, trying and utterly arrid accounts of the narrator's neurotic, pointless journeys in Italy. I frankly found it boring. From what else I've read, Sebald's other books are apparently much superior -- I would skip this first novel entirely.

Rating:
Summary: dissapointed
Review: Sorry,
I found the writing style (or translation) migrane causing. I was lured in by all the positive reviews, but found the reading of the book to be more like a chore. I'd get this from the library before I spent money on it.

Rating:
Summary: ¿Vertigo?
Review: The book is divided into four parts: two of them are devoted to two major writers in the XIXth and XXth centuries, Stendhal and Kafka; the other two, offhandedly, are devoted to the author himself.

It seems to me that Sebald takes journeys as a pretext to concatenate ideas and sensations, as he also does in his "The rings of Saturn", which seconded Vertigo some five years later.

Here and there he includes pictures that complement what he tells as if saying, "well, words are an imperfect device to convey reality, here you have an addendum, it may help". And thus he creates an atmosphere similar to that that arises when a friend starts talking about his last trip and shows us the pictures to give us an idea of what he has been through.

With a prose that at times reminds me of Proust's, Sebald narrates facts and memories in a non-anguished way. He puts himself at the right distance between Sebald-narrator and Sebald-protagonist so as he doesn't get too involved with his own experiences. Does it sound contradictory?

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Summary: R.I.P. Herr Sebald
Review: The man who brought us such moving books as this and whose trips throughout his books were often on trains or walking was tragically killed in a car accident. I can only say he is a must read. Often writing about the aftermath of World War 2 his voice was also millennial in it existential dread.

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Summary: An Existential Masterpiece
Review: The review by Gary Jakaitis captures well the structure and method of Sebald's first masterpiece. As for Sebald's intention, as conveyed to this reader, it is to observe -in great detail, real or imagined - how we mortals function in the face of the eternal. In this landscape, our fears are but fragments of a shattered glass, surrounding and reminding us of the inevitable. How does one fight such an overwhelming foe? Sebald finds that he can suspend time, and thus help it endure, by recording in memory and by creating in imagination a deep intuition of being, one in which fact, fantasy, and dreams deserve equal respect, indeed where they need not be differentiated. The resulting narrative celebrates with wonder that people do anything at all, that we are not immobilized by a vertigo resulting from our ever-present knowledge of what awaits. In this theatre, Sebald provides us a brief respite, one in which he grants us the "touching, in a moment of distraction, the knee of the man who was to have been our salvation".