646
PARTISAN REVIEW
Arabesques of Journeys
VERTIGO. By W. G. Sebald. Translated by Michael Hulse. New Direc–
tions. $23 .95 .
WHO
is
W. G. SEBALD? Who is the enigmatic German writer who first
appeared in English in
I996
with the publication of his elegiac quartet,
The
Emigrants,
who reappeared in
I998
with
The Rings of Saturn,
and who
now visits us once more with
Vertigo
(his first novel, which, in German,
preceded the other two)? Scattered throughout all three books are grainy
photographs, and occasionally we glimpse Sebald peering out from behind
his weeping-willow mustache. But these snapshots have the odd effect of
making him seem not more familiar but more otherworldly, as elusive as
the eccentric figures from history who haunt his pages. Sebald guides us
through time across Europe. But he is always moving, always just ahead of
us, already speaking to us from the shadowy realm of the beyond.
Even the books themselves are evasive: "novel" is an impoverished
word to describe Sebald's peculiar alloy of travelogue, fiction, memoir,
scholarly essay, and historical investigation. Each derives its meandering
form from a journey, or a series of journeys, that Sebald undertakes
from England, his adopted country of thirty years. Often the itinerary
traces the travels of someone else whom he follows with the tenacity of
a detective and the melancholy of an abandoned lover. One journey
branches into the recollection of another taken long ago, either by
Sebald or one of the phantoms he tracks. The books quickly become
arabesques of journeys inside of journeys, lines of motion restlessly
crossing and converging in the beautiful terra incognita of Sebald's
mind. As we follow him as if he were a Pied Piper, mesmerized by his
heartbreakingly beautiful prose, what results is a case of vertigo. The
compass points of past and present, reality and memory, absence and
presence, truth and fiction, begin to blur and become indistinct.
Webster's definition of "vertigo" is: "(I) a disturbance which is asso–
ciated with various known diseases or due to unknown causes and in
which the external world seems to revolve around the individual or the
individual seems to revolve in space;
(2)
dizziness ." The English word is
a fair translation of the title of this most recently translated of Sebald's
books, called
Schwindel Gefuhle
(his variation of the word
Schwindel–
gefuhle).
In fact, one could do worse than describe his as a literature of
vertigo: the word captures the sense, central to Sebald, of uneasiness
brought on by certain types of motion, a discomfort at once physical
