Collection: Vertigo

Overview

Vertigo (original title: Schwindel. Gefühle., 1990) is W. G. Sebald’s first major prose book, a hybrid of travel narrative, biography, and memoir threaded with photographs. Four interlinked movements spiral across the 19th and 20th centuries, following the lives and footsteps of two emblematic figures, Henri Beyle (Stendhal) and Franz Kafka, while a Sebald-like narrator undertakes his own journeys through northern Italy and back to his Bavarian homeland. The title points to bodily dizziness and to a moral and historical imbalance, as memory, place, and text induce a subtle, pervasive unsteadiness.

The four parts

“Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet” refracts Stendhal’s life into a series of emblematic episodes: the young Napoleonic officer discovering Italy; the ardor and disappointments of love; the cultivation of masks and pseudonyms; the transmutation of experience into notebooks and fiction. The account moves lightly between documented fact and imaginative reconstruction, attentive to the theatrics of passion and to the way cities, especially in Italy, trigger cascades of memory. Stendhal’s notion of “crystallization” shadows the piece, connecting desire, art, and the sense of swoon.

“All’estero” follows the narrator abroad through Austria and northern Italy in the off-season. Hotels are dim, railway waiting rooms drafty, tourist sites emptied of their consoling illusions. He traces faint itineraries that echo Beyle’s passages, registering the afterimage of empire and war in decaying infrastructures and anonymous plazas. Encounters are brief and slightly uncanny, and episodes of dizziness punctuate the journey. The landscape becomes an archive underfoot, each detour opening onto stories of marginal lives, missed connections, and the quiet persistence of damage.

“Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva” presents a collage-like portrait of Franz Kafka, here “Dr K”, during a cure on Lake Garda. Drawing on diaries and letters, the narrative follows him through border formalities, medical regimens, and the minutiae of hotel life, all filtered through a hyper-attentive, anxious sensibility. The lake’s serene vistas only heighten his sense of precariousness. Bureaucracy, illness, and writing interweave, and the prose lingers on rooms, promenades, and minor mishaps that swell into episodes of panic. The figure of Dr K becomes a prism for modernity’s frailty and estrangement.

“Il ritorno in patria” turns to homecoming. After years away, the narrator returns to his native Allgäu, visiting his mother, old teachers, and village landmarks. The seemingly familiar terrain releases a flood of recollections and local histories: wartime losses, quiet acts of complicity, unexplained disappearances, and long-suppressed tragedies. Archival fragments, hearsay, and photographs accumulate until the pastoral surface wavers. The vertigo here is temporal and ethical, as the place that formed him appears riddled with gaps and erasures.

Themes and method

Across these movements, patterns echo: circular journeys, doubles and stand-ins, border crossings, fainting fits, the feel of rooms where someone has just left. Photographs punctuate the text, neither proof nor illustration, but instruments of doubt that blur fact and invention. Sebald’s sentences advance by associative drift, folding past into present so that Stendhal’s Italy, Kafka’s Riva, and late-20th-century travel seem to occur in one continuous weather. Exile and return, love and illness, reading and walking, all induce the same oscillation between lucidity and haze.

Aftereffect

The collection proposes that disorientation is not a passing symptom but a signature of European modernity, an honest response to landscapes overlaid with conquest, romance, catastrophe, and forgetting. By aligning the private vertigo of desire and illness with the public vertigo of history, Sebald fashions a form that is both documentary and dreamlike, inviting the reader to inhabit the unstable ground where memory begins to tilt.