Vertigo

Vertigo

Rating

8.5

The Pequod Review:

W.G. Sebald moved from prose poems to purely prose in this collection of four interlocking narratives: two biographical essays on Stendhal and Kafka, a partly-autobiographical Italian travelogue, and finally an account of an unnamed narrator’s haunting return to the rural German village of his birth. Even if it doesn’t achieve the focused intensity of his later masterpieces, Vertigo is an enchanting mix of biography, literary criticism, and fiction, and includes useful photographs and other visual artifacts throughout the text.