SEBALD, W.G. Vertigo.

‘Written in a Prose of Hallucinatory Precision’

SEBALD, W.G. Vertigo. New York: New Directions. 1999.

8vo. Original quarter green cloth over grey paper-covered boards, green endpapers, in the dust-jacket designed by Semadar Megged; pp. [6], 263, [3]; a fine copy in like jacket; signed by the author without dedication in black ink to the title page.

First US edition, first impression, signed by the author.

Vertigo, originally published in German as Schwindel. Gefühle in 1990, was the first of Sebald’s four novels, and third to appear in English, following The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. Its four parts, intricately connected by a Nabokovian web of pattern and image, move seamlessly between – among much else – accounts of the young Stendhal’s unrequited love, Kafka’s tribulations in Italy, and Casanova’s imprisonment in Venice, woven into an unnerving semi-autobiographical account of Sebald’s own travels in Italy and return to his childhood home in Bavaria.

‘Devoid of self-pity and sentimentality; and […] written in a prose of hallucinatory precision’ (Enzenberger), exquisitely translated by Michael Hulse, Vertigo is a study of paranoia, displacement, and the uncertain boundaries between fact and invention – ‘the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection’ – combining suspense with a finely tuned (and rarely credited) sense of humour.

As with all Sebald’s narratives, the text is interspersed with numerous black-and-white images – photographs, documents, postcards, diagrams – at once illuminating and unsettling the work’s measured progress. As Susan Sontag states, ‘Sebald’s fictions – and their accompanying visual illustration – carry the effect of the real to a plangent extreme’, placing ideas of fiction and non-fiction under critical pressure, fruitfully – vertiginously – casting doubt upon our well-worn distinctions.

SKU: 2120583