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.
It is not often that books receive the universal critical acclaim with which W.G. Sebald's work in English translation has been met.
The Rings of Saturn, in particular, achieved the sort of plaudits which would enable most writers to die happy. Sebald's limpid prose is literally entrancing and has encouraged a serious, passionate and aesthetic response. His unique style was first employed in
Vertigo, published in the original German in 1990 and now available in English. As in
The Emigrants,
Vertigo interweaves four narratives that develop an elegiac evocation of a transcendent theme--which, in this case, is that of memory. Beginning with Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal), and his painful and unreliable recollections of the military campaign during which his rites of passage were won, the narrative elegantly traverses Sebald's own voyages through Italy. It journeys into the intersection of temporal and personal perspectives which is the stuff of all interpretations, both past and present.
As the book develops, it returns to the same locations: Milan, Verona, Venice and the Alps. In the course of this fractured meandering, the reader lives with a haunted Franz Kafka and admires the serene beauty of the stars above Lake Garda, before returning to Sebald's home in the Bavarian Alps ,where the author confronts his childhood memories.
Of all Sebald's works, his narrative style is perhaps best suited to the subject-matter of this book, for it is precisely the distorted and unfathomable essence of memory that his stumbling journey seeks to unravel. Thus in Vertigo, Sebald's integration of personal, historical and fictional perspectives, combined with the nature of his physical exploration, creates a vivid and lasting impression of the imaginative confusion that is inherent in any thought, recollection or projection. This style of writing requires deep integrity and it is impossible not to develop a picture of a deeply sensitive mind, which is aware of the very nature of its conceits and deceptions. "What is it that undoes a writer?", asks Sebald, when thinking of Stendhal. The question weighs over the rest of the book and indeed over much of Sebald's work.
In The Rings of Saturn he goes some way towards producing an answer, not just to this but indeed to the motivation of Vertigo as a whole:
"The fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight."
--
Toby Green
