Vertigo [Paperback]

"Vertigo" is a book that consists of four sections that are not completely related to one another and would have made just as much sense (or so it seems) if told in a different order. These various sections tell of journies made to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to Sebald's childhood home in the mountains of southern Germany. The journies fold and refold themselves into one another, becoming a part of one another until we're not quite sure which is which. The travels of Sebald echo the travels of Kafka, while the travels of Kafka echo those of Stendhal. Sebald, himself, encounters Dante in the Duomo, King Ludwig II on a vaporetto and the daughter of James I at Heidelberg Station. What is real? What is not? Sebald never gives us any clear-cut answers, for that was never the purpose of his journey, nor of this book.

The first section of "Vertigo" is a third-person biographical sketch of a nineteenth-century Napoleonic soldier named Beyle and it begins with Napoleon's crossing of the Alps into Austrian Italy. Sebald has, himself, perused Beyle's own journals for the material that make up this sketch. It is to Sebald's credit, at least in my estimation, that he never mentions the fact that Beyle is the birth name of the French novelist, Stendhal. Sebald had far too much respect for our own intelligence to "spell it all out."

The important questions raised in this section are: "How reliable is memory?" and, "Are memories, even when they conflict with facts, still reliable indicators of personal experience?" Sebald, of course, is dwelling on his own cultural heritage and the fact that the "official" history of Germany is one that has been written and rewritten in an effort to make it more palatable to those not directly involved.

In the second section of the book, Sebald moves to the first-person as a nameless, faceless narrator (who both is and is not, Sebald) travels over the same landscape as did Stendhal: a garden in Verona, the Duomo in Milan, the mist-shrouded Doge's Palace in Venice, the winding alleys of Vienna. Here, the narrator seems to be pursued by ghosts, the ghost of Dante, Casanova and King Ludwig of Bavaria. "Is it possible," he seems to be asking, "to endure that which is totally unendurable?"

The third section is one of the most imaginative and, shifting to the third person once again, Sebald narrates Franz Kafka's 1913 journey from Prague to Riva, Italy on the beautiful Lago di Garda. This is a gorgeous, almost playful recapitulation of the second section and it should be read quietly, carefully and slowly in order to get the most out of it.

The fourth and final section details Sebald's 1987 visit to his own birthplace in Germany. For Sebald, being German meant carrying something incurable, something akin to Stendhal's syphilis. Even the German countryside seems to have taken on a surreal quality. Its well-built houses with their sparkling clean windows and neat woodpiles bear no resemblance to the Germany Sebald left so many years ago. As Sebald contemplates this antiseptic cleansing of Germany and his own inability to escape his "Germanness," the vertigo of the book returns to haunt him. Has his generation been the victim or the perpetrator of a massive swindle of denial? Have they bartered away their innocence for nothing?

Although "Vertigo" is a more abstract and difficult book than Sebald's masterpiece, "The Emigrants" (which is also composed of four sections), the two books do depict the same subject matter...Germans who must, but cannot, face their own Germanness. Emigrants who have not only left their country of origin, but have lost it as well. People who are, of necessity, on the verge of a quiet, introspective madness. "While it might have been rare for a man to be driven insane," writes Sebald, "little was required to tip the balance."

Sebald's closing warning to his readers is also an echo, an echo of the warning sign found in the London Underground: "Mind the gap." Mind the gap between truth and lies, between fiction and reality, between history and propaganda, between what we know and what we only think we know, between forgetting and remembering.

"Vertigo" is surely a book worth remembering.

"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.

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.