Vertigo

At moments when reality shows itself to be unstable or uncanny, we experience a form of vertigo. This is further complicated when we try to transform experience into writing, and fact clashes with memory. Vertigo explores this theme through four stories and four journeys. With Stendhal we travel through the unreliable and painful recollections of an inglorious military career. With Kafka we travel to Italy and an unsuccessful bid to regain physical and mental well-being. Through these journeys and two by the unnamed narrator one to Bavaria to revisit the places shaped by childhood memories - Sebald examines the unreliability of memory, the intensity of childhood experience and the dizzying unknowability of the past. Using Sebald s own mixture of personal narrative, investigation, report, quotation (both textual and pictorial) and meditation, Vertigo is a wonderful journey into the human mind and its methods of mediating reality and the past.