Vertigo

At moments when reality shows itself to be unstable or uncanny, we experience a form of vertigo. This experience is further complicated when we try to transform experience into writing, and fact clashes with memory. Sebald's novel, part fiction, part travelogue explores this theme. ‘Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one''s regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed’ Anita Brookner, SpectatorWhat could possibly connect Stendhal''s unrequited love, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona? Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of Sebald’s compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. ‘As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell… [Sebald] entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires’ Robert McCrum, Observer