Originally published in Germany in 1990, this is the first of the remarkable part-philosophical travelogue, part-fiction narratives of a truly great writer. Sebald, author of The Emigrants (1993 Frankfurt; 1996 London) and The Rings of Saturn (1995 Frankfurt; 1998 London) is an original with a vision shaped by the European intellectual tradition, his dazzling originality and visual sense. Less seamlessly random than his later books, Vertigo is composed of four distinct movements, moving from the adventures of the young Stendhal as a soldier in Napoleon's army, to the narrator's chance criss-crossing of the trail of a pair of serial killers, to a point where the second and third sequences merge through the ghost of Franz Kafka. The fourth section brings the displaced narrator through southern Germany, to his native Bavarian village and scenes from his childhood. Few writers possess the grace, artistry and laconic tone of this wonderful thinker. Though not matching the magnificence of The Rings of Sat- urn, Vertigo is another imaginative, elegiac odyssey through landscape, history, memory, war, the limitations of life and the relentlessness of death.
