A very troubling book, especially in the wake of the 9-11 events. The author asks why the air war over German in the last years of WWII has not received more attention by German postwar authors. Troubling in the dimensions of the impact of the air war as he relates it: 600.000 civilian lives lost, 400.000 missions (counting single planes) flown by the RAF alone, 20.000 civilians or more killed in a single night's raid, etc. More troubling when one consideres the psychological impact on the survivors (short and long term).
Besides Sebald's question regarding the air war over Germany, it would be important to review the literature, produced by writers of the respective cultures, of air wars over Japan, Vietnam, Iraque or, now, Afghanistan.
It appears mass destructions of civiizations are not the provenance of one people or culture, hence long term morning efforts of affected people or cultures might benefit by being done jointly.
Certainly an important addition to any Holocaust library.

W. G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" is categorized as a work of fiction, although it is often difficult to discern what is, in fact, imagined and what is real. Dreamlike, mysterious, sublime, enigmatic, strange--all these adjectives appropriately have been used to describe Sebald's remarkable work of literary, philosophical and historical imagination.

"The Rings of Saturn" is a first person narrative of the author's year-long ramble through East Anglia beginning in August, 1992. It is a "ramble" not only in the physical sense--a walker's tour and observation of the natural surroundings and history of the land--but also in the mental sense, being a series of historical, philosophical and psychological digressions triggered by everything Sebald sees and experiences on his journey. The landscapes are, thus, both interior and exterior. They are also landscapes that exist not only in the present, but extend back into the past and forward into the future; both natural and mental history become trans-temporal, the ground for a dreamlike ponderousness that, at times, takes the reader's breath away.

"The Rings of Saturn" is, in many ways, a dark relation of the author's experience, for he "became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over [him] at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place." He ends up, at the end of his journey--"a year to the day after [he] began his tour"--in a total state of immobility in a Norwich hospital. It is here that the book begins, that Sebald "began in [his] thoughts to write these pages."

Filled with grainy and sometimes mysterious, disturbing and imaginatively illustrative black and white photographs of the narrator's thoughts and experiences, "The Rings of Saturn" is equally fertile in flights of imaginative and historical reflection. Thus, the author's stay in the Norwich hospital leads to a digressive exploration of the obscure writings of the seventeenth century writer Thomas Browne, whose skull was at one time kept in the hospital's museum, an old-time cabinet of wonders. This, in turn, runs into a discursis on Rembrandt's painting, "The Anatomy Lesson". Reaching the seaside leads to an exploration of the history of herring fishing. The dim recollection of a PBS documentary on the life of Roger Casement, a recollection floating in the narrator's mind as he drifts off to sleep, leads to a detailed exploration of Joseph Conrad's experiences in the Belgian Congo, where Conrad had briefly encountered Casement.

The digressions go on and on. "The Rings of Saturn" is, in a sense, like being in the mind of Sebald during the course of time, a mind experiencing reality, dreaming illusion, and speculating on nature, man, literature, and time. The imaginary becomes real; the real, imaginary. Thus, tracts of Borges are cited as authority, treated as valid scientific works, when Sebald discusses time. "The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlon. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory."

Conflating the real and imaginary, the historical and the fictional, "The Rings of Saturn" represents an obsessive and powerful work of literature, a narrative that shows the uncanny ways in which imagination can be used to connect our lives with the world and with the past, even though "we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

W. G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" is categorized as a work of fiction, although it is often difficult to discern what is, in fact, imagined and what is real. Dreamlike, mysterious, sublime, enigmatic, strange--all these adjectives appropriately have been used to describe Sebald's remarkable work of literary, philosophical and historical imagination.

"The Rings of Saturn" is a first person narrative of the author's year-long ramble through East Anglia beginning in August, 1992. It is a "ramble" not only in the physical sense--a walker's tour and observation of the natural surroundings and history of the land--but also in the mental sense, being a series of historical, philosophical and psychological digressions triggered by everything Sebald sees and experiences on his journey. The landscapes are, thus, both interior and exterior. They are also landscapes that exist not only in the present, but extend back into the past and forward into the future; both natural and mental history become trans-temporal, the ground for a dreamlike ponderousness that, at times, takes the reader's breath away.

"The Rings of Saturn" is, in many ways, a dark relation of the author's experience, for he "became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over [him] at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place." He ends up, at the end of his journey--"a year to the day after [he] began his tour"--in a total state of immobility in a Norwich hospital. It is here that the book begins, that Sebald "began in [his] thoughts to write these pages."

Filled with grainy and sometimes mysterious, disturbing and imaginatively illustrative black and white photographs of the narrator's thoughts and experiences, "The Rings of Saturn" is equally fertile in flights of imaginative and historical reflection. Thus, the author's stay in the Norwich hospital leads to a digressive exploration of the obscure writings of the seventeenth century writer Thomas Browne, whose skull was at one time kept in the hospital's museum, an old-time cabinet of wonders. This, in turn, runs into a discursis on Rembrandt's painting, "The Anatomy Lesson". Reaching the seaside leads to an exploration of the history of herring fishing. The dim recollection of a PBS documentary on the life of Roger Casement, a recollection floating in the narrator's mind as he drifts off to sleep, leads to a detailed exploration of Joseph Conrad's experiences in the Belgian Congo, where Conrad had briefly encountered Casement.

The digressions go on and on. "The Rings of Saturn" is, in a sense, like being in the mind of Sebald during the course of time, a mind experiencing reality, dreaming illusion, and speculating on nature, man, literature, and time. The imaginary becomes real; the real, imaginary. Thus, tracts of Borges are cited as authority, treated as valid scientific works, when Sebald discusses time. "The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlon. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory."

Conflating the real and imaginary, the historical and the fictional, "The Rings of Saturn" represents an obsessive and powerful work of literature, a narrative that shows the uncanny ways in which imagination can be used to connect our lives with the world and with the past, even though "we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

Tomorrow is the first death anniversary of W G Sebald. On behalf of his adoring readers I wish to pay homage to this astonishing writer whose sublime novels are the noblest artefacts of the literary conscience of our times and a gift to humanity. Sebald has left us the true literary masterpieces of the 1990s and the inaugural texts of tomorrow's fiction. A postmodern-existentialist, Sebald channeld a deep drift of pensive introspection into pathbreaking narratives of elegiac wisdom and enchanting beauty that explain who we are in time,history and the cosmos. An account of a walking tour of Suffolk undertaken in 1992,The Rings of Saturn dizzly spirals beyond walking the ephemeral earth where "it takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes" into a celestial contemplation that soars to include everything and exclude nothing and reach a heaven of "a time when the tears will be wiped from our eyes and there will be no more grief or pain, or weeping and wailing." As he travels through the Suffolk countryside, Sebald unifies numberless people, places and events that are normally scattered in time and space into the ulitimate epiphany of the eternity of a moment and the infinity of a place that comes streaming into his consciousness in a narrative annunciation like " the rays of the sun...that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence." While "it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day," it is an imponderable enigma that our hopeless ephemerality allows us companionship in consciousness with countless centuries. Befitting a novel about the mystery of Oneness, Sebald's title is mystically grand and suggests that the writing of his novel is not different from the occurrence of the rings of Saturn. Can we walk in eternity? Can we walk to eternity. Sebald has.

W. G. Sebald, "On The Natural History of Destruction," Random House, NY, 2003, originally published in German as "Luftkrieg und Literatur," 1999, translated by Anthea Bell.

During World War II, Allied bombers attacked 131 German towns and cities destroying 3.5 million homes and killing or injuring 600,000 German civilians. In 1997, Mr. Sebald gave a series of lectures on the literature describing the effects of these attacks. He was surprised that so little had been written about them. He infers that Germans are still in denial about these horrors of war. This volume summarizes his lectures plus the letters he received in response to news reports of his lectures. Appended are three additional essays.

Central to his theme is the fire storming technique developed by the Allies to destroy major cities. Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Nuremberg, Ludwigshafen, Darmstadt, and Halberstadt are named as destroyed in this way. The destruction of Hamburg on July 27, 1943, by the RAF supported by the US Eighth Air Force, is described in gruesome detail. High explosive bombs weighing up to 4000 lb. were used to destroy windows and doors. They were followed by incendiary devices both light (to ignite upper stories) and heavy (to ignite lower floors). Within 20 minutes, massive fires were burning that created flames to a height of 2000 meters and hurricane force winds that stripped roofs from buildings and drove human beings along like torches. The fire burned intensely for three hours. Glass windows melted. Sugar stocks boiled. Corpses sank into molten asphalt streets. Survivors were found aimlessly wandering the streets-some carrying deceased infants. Numerous people died in bomb shelters, in cellars, and buried in the rubble. Flies, maggots and rats soon swarmed through the area. The stench of rotting corpses was everywhere. Eventually dense green vegetation grew over the ruins. Photos of the destruction at that stage are many. A selection of these photos is included in the book.

The letters Sebald received confirmed a general lack of detailed information. A few accounts were found in diaries and in several novels. Some accounts were privately published. An apparent taboo by publishers was reinforced by the poor commercial success of the few works that did make it into print. Considerable amounts of disinformation circulated in Germany making it difficult for individuals to know the facts of these raids. The author cites the traditional strict control of intimate feelings within the German family as one cause of the apparent lack of interest in the destruction caused by the war.

One book his letters did find is: Dr. Hans Joachim Schroeder, "Die gestohlenen Jahre-Erzaehlgeschichten und Geschichterzaehlung im Interview: Der zweite Weltkrieg aus der Sicht ehemaliger Mannschaftssoldaten, (The Stolen Years-Narratives and History in Interviews: The Second World War as Seen by Former Soldiers), Niemeyer, 1992. The author discounts this source as being surprisingly stereotypical.

Seebald's thesis may in fact be overdrawn. Numerous disasters-both natural and military-have occurred over the centuries. Few are described from the victim's viewpoint. The Japanese have publicized the effects of nuclear war using survivors' stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (seen here on public television), but similar accounts of the destruction of Tokyo or the Battle of Okinawa are lacking. Even reports of the London Blitz tend not to be told from the point of view of the victims.

The normal reaction to any tragic event is for people to get on with their lives as soon as they are able. Germans seem to have done that. Only Germans can decide whether they need to re-examine the pain of wartime destruction.

This volume is translated from German. It reads reasonably smoothly. Classical German is enamored with long, multi-clause, compound sentences. A few of these got by the translator. The second sentence of Chapter 1 runs 133 words. The Foreword ends with a 78 word sentence, followed by a 47 worder.

All of this is closely related to German efforts to come to terms with World War II. That process seems to be moving along. The current volume is a glimpse of that dialog. The book does demonstrate the difficulties Germans have writing about World War II-even 60 years after the event. Sebald retells the story of animals injured in the bombing of the Berlin zoo. Published soon after the war, that report reeks of Nazi propaganda. Later, in an apparent effort to ward off charges of Neo-nazism, he replies to a letter with charges of pseudo-intellectualism and with strongly anti-Nazi comments. No matter how innocent, any discussion of the war risks the suspicion of spin meisters. References. No index.

This posthumous volume of Sebald's non-fiction writing is a major contribution to German literary criticism and politico-cultural analysis. Accompanying his reflections on the traumatic impact of the air war against German cities are essays studying the very diverse reactions of three 'witnesses' of that time as reflected in their post-war literary works. In AIR WAR AND LITERATURE, originally presented as the Zurich Lectures, Sebald delves deeply into some very uncomfortable questions. The air war on 131 German cities killed some six hundred thousand civilians and destroyed more than the homes of seven and a half million people. Why have these events resulted mostly in public silence for decades? Why have so few literary works attempted to speak to the traumatic impact on the population? Most Germans seem to have tried to come to terms with the realities of the war years by suppressing their immediate pain and the longer-term suffering. Sebald has thoroughly researched a multitude of authors, both in fiction and non-fiction. Yet, he deems their explanations unsatisfactory. Heinrich Boell is cited as one of the early exceptions, yet publication of his book, The Silent Angel, was delayed by forty years.

Sebald contemplates the different causes for this persistent silence. For example, basing himself on a range of contemporary sources, he confronts the reader with a detailed description of the Hamburg firestorm. As disturbing as his account is, Sebald's reflective style makes it readable. His objective reporting neither criticises the Allies' campaign nor does he apologise for German actions leading to the war. He wonders, though, whether the depth of the traumatic experiences of this and other air attacks may have left many people numb and dazed, unable to express their reactions for a long time. The account of a young mother wandering through the station confused and stunned is one of several examples. Her suitcase suddenly opens onto the platform revealing the charcoaled remains of her baby.

Sebald's intent is not to shock but to explain the deep sense of loss that must have been felt by people like her. He further contends that at that time in the war, the growing acceptance of guilt for the Nazi's atrocities led in many civilians to an acknowledgment of justified punishment by the Allied forces. Last, not least, after the war many Germans experienced a 'lifting of a heavy burden' that they felt they had lived under during the Nazi regime. Concentrating on building the new Germany focused their minds on a better future. The publication (in German) of his Lectures in 1997 resulted in a range of reactions from readers. He reflects their varied views and comments in a postscript, thereby adding a fascinating 1990's dimension to his "rough-and-ready collection of various observations, materials, and theses".

The three authors who are the subject of the essays in this volume may be better known to students of German literature and culture. They represent a fine example of Sebald's skill as a contemplative and sensitive literary critic. At the same time, these essays complement Sebald's Lectures in a more fundamental way. In terms of coming to terms with the Nazi period and its atrocities, each one represents a specific type of German with his own means and ways of dealing with the recent past. Alfred Andersch is presented as having reinterpreted his personal history to fit his vision of self-importance in post-war Germany. Jean Amery, of half Jewish parentage, suffered through SS torture and survived various concentration camps. For the rest of his life, which he ended himself, he did not lose the nightmares of his torment. It was not until the mid-sixties, that he found his voice to impart his experiences in the form of essays on exile, genocide and resistance. Peter Weiss, who had lived in exile most of his life, found his self-expression mainly through painting and theatre productions until he published late in life his major fiction work, Aesthetics of Resistance.

This collection of "mediations on natural guilt, national victimhood, and the universal consequences of denying the past" is a significant socio-political document. Its importance for today's reader goes beyond the concrete German situation. As it addresses more fundamental issues of dealing with a society's traumatic past experiences, Sebald also confronts the need to develop the capacity to heal while learning and sharing the lessons from that past. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa Ontario]

I found Sebald's descriptions of the Allied firebombing to be moving. One reviewer faults Sebald for his inclusion of several pages on the destruction of the zoo, because the reviewer thinks the original description that Sebald uses gives comfort to neo-Nazis. Perhaps it does, but that doesn't make it invalid. And if you look at the totality of this work, it certainly does not in any way condone Germany's Nazi past.

What Sebald is discussing is human memories of the bombings, and the repression of those memories. He isn't discussing the rights or wrongs of the bombings, which he mentions only briefly in what he calls a postscript. I don't think this should be used, as another reviewer has, to argue that he is minimizing German guilt. You could take the other point of view equally well: that he is minimizing Allied guilt by not discussing criticisms of the Allied bombing campaign. These issues are not germane to his narrowly-defined topic. In other words, the book is not a history of bombing, nor is it a discussion of the ethics of bombing civilians; rather, it is a description of what people remember about these events in later years.

I found the second part of the book, a discussion of Alfred Andersch, to be equally interesting. Here is a man who, according to Sebald, used his novels to rewrite the story of his life, and he wrote it as he probably should have lived it, rather than as he did live it. And he did this without ever apologizing for (or even admitting) his less than heroic behavior in real life.

The last two essays were less interesting to me than the rest of the work. They might be more useful to specialists in modern German literature. This brings me to what I consider a defect in this book. Surely the people about whom Sebald is writing are not household names in the U.S. I think that the translator or publisher should have included brief biographies of these individuals.

And while we are on this subject, I think the translator could have added to Sebald's footnotes too. In the section on Andersch, we are told that he divorces his wife in 1943 because she is Jewish, thus leaving her and their daughter at the mercy of the Nazi regime. But, although we are told of the fate of Andersch's mother-in-law, we are never told what happens to his ex-wife & daughter.

All in all, however, I think this work is well worth reading. It's not one that you will forget once you have finished reading it.

They don't get much better than this.
I noticed when I started this book that it is a translation done by Anthea Bell, but this may in itself be just a literary device, or the author must have worked very closely with the author. How else could he, or she, or both have achieved such beautiful English prose. Truly enviable. I am glad to see that one reviewer talked about the texture of the prose in terms of music, and he is right on the mark. Everything is in a minor key and the general tonality and pacing contribute richly to the darkness of the narrative, which is indeed dark. The main theme seems to be how easily if unwillingly we tend to fall from life into death. And almost, sometimes, back again.

Austerlitz tells his story to an unnamed narrator. He was brought up in Wales by a fanatic but civilized preacher and his marginally functional wife but as an adolescent discovers his true origins lie elsewhere. Most of the book deals with his attempt to learn about his beginnings and his parents, victims of Nazi genocide.

The book's fascinating structure is built on descriptions of European train stations and other public buildings, most notably the new National Library in Paris which Austerlitz considers (and by any reasonalbe accounting is) an abomination built on hostility to readers and their search for understanding. Yes, I have visited it.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has despaired of finding high literary standards in contemporary writing.

Sebald's book is an exquisite description of the echo of the holocaust in central and western Europe. The narrative centers on a historian of architecture who had been adopted by a Welsh couple during the Second World War. As he searches for his past he discovers that he had come to Great Britain on one of the trains that brought Jewish children to safety from Nazi-occupied Europe. In an attempt to learn more about his parents he travels to Czechoslovakia and France and retraces their fascinating but tragic lives. This story presents the holocaust as a dark void that weighs heavily on the life of the next generation. The book is exquisitely written, and the descriptions of the journeys and persons are incredibly detailed and, for this member of the Czech second generation, uncannily accurate. Photographs of buildings and other inanimate objects help set the mood. The book should not be read in a hurry because it starts slowly and takes off gradually. The patient reader will be rewarded by hauntingly beautiful descriptions of events, places and states of mind, all connected by the indelible mark of the Holocaust.

Austerlitz is a negative, an undeveloped film of memory swished around in the fluid of the reader's imagination, from which emerge images at once clear and indistinct. Readers familiar with Sebald's work will recognize ideas and techniques in the first part of this book - the seemingly random historical associations, the beautifully dense and allusive sentence structures, the haunting photos that poetically omit more than they include - but as the narrative progresses, shadows of the Nazi holocaust take form and lead us deeper into the inferno. The emotional distance and intellectual reluctance start to make sense - they not only characterize the narrator, but they enhance our sense of his human frailty. I kept wondering what kind of book this was - a memoir, a thinly veiled confession, or a fiction of remarkable power? The patterns and connections suggested a literary invention, but every element rang true and seemed idiosyncratically real. The author's death also lends a note of finality and definition to this evocative work, making it necessarily Sebald's last word on recurring themes. If you've not read any of his other books, this is still a fine place to start, because each demands rereading in the context of the whole. For a while his books just play on in your memory, yet when you pick them up again they are full of surprises and undiscovered gems. I recommend getting the hardcover copy so that the binding can stand up to repeated reference.

If you're not familiar with Sebald's work, you should read his 'Rings of Saturn' or 'The Emigrants' first. This book, although similar in reflective style, is a bit more introspective than the other two. 'Vertigo' is a kind of a travelogue of the author, and I use the term 'travelogue' loosely. His memories of various places intersect with the travels and events of other people in different periods of time, namely Stendhal, Kafka and Cassanova. This novel is really hard to summarize, and I don't think one should. The most rewarding part of reading this intellectually kinky little book is trying to make heads and tails of it in the end. If you want fast-paced storyline, or exotic occurrences, look elsewhere. But this man's slow, hypnotic prose alone was enough to captivate me til the end. I believe Sebald is a pioneer of contemporary fiction. He bends forms, defies categorization. He subverts fictional truths with real truths and vice-versa, and if it takes putting a picture of his real passport in the book for the sake of documentation, he will do that. (Which he does.) I can't wait to read more of his stuff.

"Vertigo," the third of W. G. Sebald's works to appear in English translation, is a disorienting narrative that conflates history, memory, dream, and imagination. The result is another literary tour de force from the author of "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn," a remarkable work that is difficult to classify, but reinforces Sebald's deserved reputation as one of Europe's most original and preeminent contemporary writers.

"Vertigo" begins with an historical figure, in this case Marie Henri Beyle, better known to literary history as Stendhal. In the opening section ("Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet"), our third person narrator relates certain of the amorous adventures of Beyle during his travels in Italy, beginning with his first arrival in that country at the age of seventeen as a soldier in Napoleon's army. The year is 1800 and the historical record is drawn from Beyle's own notes of his experience, written more than three decades later at the age of 53. As if foreshadowing the vertiginous unreliability of the narrative to follow, the narrator (Sebald?) relates as follows: "The notes in which the 53-year-old Beyle, writing during a sojourn at Civitavecchia, attempted to relive the tribulations of those days afford eloquent proof of the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection."

The third person narrative shifts, in the second section, to a first person relation of travels in Austria and Italy by our narrator beginning in the year 1980. It is an unreliable narrative, confounding dream and reality, past and present, in a text that seems to have a mysterious, underlying hermeticism. Thus, while aimlessly wandering the dark streets of Vienna, the narrator often thought he saw someone he knew walking ahead of me. "On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognized the poet Dante, banished from his hometown on pain of being burned at the stake." Similarly, in the dark, misty, maze-like streets of Venice, "there sat, and in fact very nearly lay, a man in a worn green loden coat whom I immediately recognized as King Ludwig II of Bavaria."

In a remarkable, resonant passage that writes another layer on the palimpsest of literary renderings of Venice, Sebald writes: "As you enter into the heart of that city, you cannot tell what you will see next or indeed who will see you the very next moment. Scarcely has someone made an appearance than he has quit the stage by another exit. These brief exhibitions are of an almost theatrical obscenity and at the same time have an air of conspiracy about them, into which one is drawn against one's will. If you walk behind someone in a deserted alleyway, you have only to quicken your step slightly to instill a little fear into the person you are following. And equally, you can feel like a quarry yourself. Confusion and ice-cold terror alternate."

In Venice, too, the narrator muses on the dark history of the Doge's Palace, reflecting, in particular on the early nineteenth century writings of the German Franz Grillparzer and on one of the victims of the harsh justice carried out in that palace, Giacomo Casanova. Grillparzer, a lawyer, ponders that "the resolutions passed here by the Council of State must be mysterious, immutable and harsh." It is a thought that brings to mind Kafka's "The Trial", among other things, and it is not surprising that, in the next breath, the reader learns that Casanova's memoir of his imprisonment in the Doge's Palace was first published in, of all places, Prague.

From here, the narrative shifts once again to the third person, this time in a section entitled "Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva." It is, again, a purportedly historical narrative of Franz Kafka's trip in 1913 from Prague to Vienna and then on to Italy, where he visits Venice, Verona and Riva, a city on the shores of Lake Garda. Kafka's journeys mirror those of the narrator in the second section of the book and the dreamlike repetitions, doublings, doppelgangers which re-occur throughout "Vertigo" provide a deeply entwined narrative for the careful reader. Thus, in a passage that, in some sense, is a trope for the entire text, Kafka stands on the porch of the Pellegrini Chapel in Verona, a place where the narrator himself related he had stood in 1980 in the previous section of the book: "When Doctor K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner."

From Kafka's 1913 experiences, the final section of Vertigo relates the narrator's return in November, 1987, to his childhood home in the Tyrol. It is the most introspective and personal section of "Vertigo," but still remains tied to the text that has gone before, resonating with themes, enigmas and uncertainties that make "Vertigo" a puzzle-palace of literary and historical renderings.

I could say much more about "Vertigo," tie many more passages and themes together, make a plethora of textual allusions and connections. This would do nothing more, however, than demonstrate the richness of Sebald's imagination, the density of his writing, the dream-like dislocations and uncertainties of his original and unclassifiable literary enterprise. If you read no other book this year, read "Vertigo" or "The Emigrants" or "The Rings of Saturn"; just be sure to read at least one of W. G. Sebald's books because you will not be disappointed.

Although it as only now come out in English, "Vertigo" preceded "The Emigrants" and "Rings of Saturn", and was the first book in which Sebald developed his unique prose style. There are four sections of varying length. The first is devoted to the French writer Stendhal crossing the Alps with Napoleon; the following one shows us the familiar Sebald persona in Italy; the third is about Kafka's trip to the same country; the last and most moving one has the narrator return to his native Bavaria. To those who know Sebald, no more needs to be said. To the others, one might try to give an idea by saying that Sebald's style could perhaps be explained as a kind of civilized interior monologue; it always implies the awareness that writing cannot imitate the way we really think, yet it uses the associations that come to the narrator's mind to make the texutre of the narrative immensely satisfying and touching.