Description

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The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time.

Vertigo, W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

About the Author

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W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.

Michael Hulse is an English translator, critic, and poet. Hulse has translated more than sixty books from the German.

Praise For…

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Sebald is a thrilling, original writer. He makes narration a state of investigative bliss.
— W. S. Di Piero - The New York Times Book Review

Think of W. G. Sebald as memory's Einstein.
— Richard Eder - The New York Times

[An] exquisitely composed work.
— Publishers Weekly

[A] haunting masterpiece from W. G. Sebald.
— Washington Post

For all its dark contents and burden of undeclared grief, Vertigo is dizzyingly light and transparent.

— Benjamin Kunkel - Village Voice

[Sebald's writing] is very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful. This German who has lived in England for thirty years is one of the most exciting, and most mysteriously sublime, of contemporary European writers.
— James Wood - The New Republic

[D]iverts and surprises at every turn, and bears the unmistakable stamp of maturity and erudition.
— Philip Landon - Review of Contemporary Fiction

[A]n intriguing peregrination through time, memory, displacement...provides a first look at the author whose reputation has only continued to grow.
— Bondo Wyszpolski - Redondo Beach News

[A]n intensely personal work, showing us Sebald's genesis as a writer, and is constantly stimulating.
— Sebastian Shakespeare - Times Literary Review

One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed.
— Anita Brookner - Spectator