Vertigo

Vertigo
Author: W.G Sebald 1990 263 pp
My rating: 3*
Started May 9 2008, Finished April 12 2008

??? Huh ??? This book, which raises plotlessness to new heights, might appeal to the most elevated of literati, of which I am apparently not one since I felt like it went over my head. Even though almost nothing happens in this book, it is still hard to follow, as the prose is characterized by subtle transitions in time, setting and protagonist’s mental state between reflection, remembrance, dreaming and envisioning events that happened to other people.

The gist of the plot, as near as I could make out, is as follows:

The first section summarizes the adult life of a soldier in Napoleon’s army who once after the wars are over, becomes a renowned author beset by syphilis. This section, which apparently is based on the life of Stendahl (I learned this from a review of Vertigo), had, as near as I could tell, no direct connection to the rest of the book. The author states that the protagonist of this section spent his adult life trying to answer the question “what is it that undoes a writer?”; after reading Vertigo, I feel like I know what undoes a reader.

The rest of the book is concerned with a German expatriate (whose biographical details match Sebald’s -- again I learned this from a review) who travels to Europe to conduct “research”. In the middle section of the book, the research is about a Dr. K (who turns out to be Kafka – a fact which again eluded me). The rest of the book covers the protagonists return to his hometown of W where he reminisces. The ending captures the general evanescence and arbitrariness of the narrative: the narrator is in a subway, when he starts to dream of a chalk mountain which segues into Samuel Pepys’ remembrance of the apocalyptic aftermath of the Great Fire of London.

In general the book could be characterized as a meditation on memory or a real time dream journal, the later because while what’s happening at the present time makes perfect sense, it often does not seem connected to what came before or went after. In its disconnectedness of narrative and generally bleak tone, the later epitomized by the narrator’s recapitulation of a grade school lesson in which the teacher presented a “history of calamity” of W, enumerated the many catastrophes which had befallen W over the centuries, Vertigo faintly reminded me of The Waste Land, although without the resonant music of that work.

I should also mention that Vertigo is the sort of book that tends to run 25 pages with a single paragraph break and that it includes various photos and illustrations which depict something the narrator has been describing, a touch I found helpful and helped a bit to ground it.