VERTIGO (First UK edition - first impression - wrappers issue)

W. G. Sebald (Translated from the German by Michael Hulse)

ISBN 10: 1860466249 / ISBN 13: 9781860466243

Published by The Harvill Press, London, 1999

About this Item

First impression of the first UK edition with full number-string sequence including the no. "1": 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 on the printer's page. This paperback edition was published simultaneously with a scarcer hardback edition. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. Illustrated with black and white photographs throughout the text. ***Very good in monochrome photo-illustrated card covers with integral folding French flaps, with silver titles to the spine and front cover. There are some light creases to the edges, mainly on the back cover, but the covers are clean and only lightly marked. No major creases or tears, and no reading creases to the spine. Corners sharp. No reading lean to the binding. Spine tight. There is a light abrasion to the bottom of the fore-edge of the page block, and some creasing and marking to the bottom corner of the last few pages (please see scans). No inscriptions. Apart from the aforementioned creasing and marking to the last few pages, the interior pages are clean and bright. No tears. ***210mm x150mm. 263 pages. ***Contents: I. Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet, II. All'estero, III. Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva, IV. Il ritorno in patria. ***'"Vertigo" is the book in which W. G. Sebald first employed the spell-binding blend of personal narrative, investigation, fiction, history and ravel writing that has since won him international acclaim for "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn". ***In the first of four linked narratives following the young Stendhal (at that time still Marie Henri Beyle) as he revisits the battlefields of Napoleon's Italian Campaign, Sebald announces his theme: the vertiginous unreliability of memory. In the second and third narratives, the frescoes of Pisanello, the imprisonment of Casanova in Venice, the trials of Franz Kafka in Italy, and the narrator's own uneasy journeyings, develop the theme. In the final movement, motifs sketched in the earlier parts of the book are synthesised into one mesmerising autobiographical quest as Sebald returns to his childhood roots in southern Germany to discover the dizzying otherness of his own past. ***Line by line we are drawn into a symphonic labyrinth from which escape seems impossible, until Sebald introduces his final theme: the delight the creative process takes in blending, transforming and refashioning past experience into a new and consoling whole.' (Quote taken from the front flap) ***First impression of the first UK edition of W. G. Sebald's "Vertigo", published as a paperback original (simultaneously with a scarcer hardback edition). A good reading copy of the original printing of this Sebald classic. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

Seller Inventory # PB720

Bibliographic Details

• Title: VERTIGO (First UK edition - first impression - wrappers issue)
• Publisher: The Harvill Press, London
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1860466249
• ISBN 13: 9781860466243
• Binding: Original Wraps
• Edition: First UK Paperback Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, as Issued
• Seller catalogs:
  • Collectable Paperbacks
  • First Editions
  • Literature in Translation

About this title

Synopsis

Translated by Michael Hulse. His 2nd work of fiction originally published in Germany as Schwindel. Gefuhle in 1990. The first book in his Rings of Saturn trilogy. The book consists of four narratives in history.

Review

It is not often that books receive the universal critical acclaim with which W.G. Sebald's work in English translation has been met. Both The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn won the sort of plaudits that would enable most writers to die happy. Sebald first employed his limpid, literally entrancing style in Vertigo, which appeared in German in 1990 and then waited a decade for its English-language debut. Like The Emigrants, this earlier novel interweaves four different narratives, which cumulatively sound a single, transcendent note--in this case, that of memory.

Sebald begins with Marie Henri Beyle (better known as Stendhal), cruising through the French author's painful and unreliable recollections of his military career. Then he splices in his own voyage through Italy, allowing these historical and personal perspectives to intersect when we least expect them to. As the book develops, it returns to the same locations: Milan, Verona, Venice, and the Alps. And in the course of this fractured meandering, the reader cohabits with a haunted Franz Kafka, admires the serene beauty of the stars above Lake Garda, and ultimately returns to Sebald's home in Bavaria, where the author confronts his childhood memories.

For Sebald, a straight line is never the shortest distance between two points: he more often travels in concentric circles, or cuts wild capers from past to present. Yet the stumbling journey in Vertigo seeks to replicate the distorted and unfathomable workings of memory itself. And it succeeds to an astonishing extent, so that the acts of traveling, recalling, and writing are impossible to tell apart:

On this occasion in the midst of the holiday season, the night train from Vienna to Venice, on which in the late October of 1980 I had seen nobody except a pale-faced schoolmistress from New Zealand, was so overcrowded that I had to stand in the corridor all the way or crouch uncomfortably among suitcases and rucksacks, so that instead of drifting into sleep I slid into my memories. Or rather, the memories (at least so it seemed to me) rose higher and higher in some space outside of myself, until, having reached a certain level, they overflowed from that space into me, like water over the top of a weir.

Thus is the writer inundated. And so, happily, are his readers--those lucky enough to take the plunge. --Toby Green