BOOKS
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ness such as Multiple Personality Disorder. And even if Sebald is not quite
delusional about his own identity, at the first hotel that allows him to
check in without a passport, he signs the guest log as Jakob Philipp
Fallmerayer, historian, of Landeck Tyrol. At another hotel his passport is
mistakenly given to someone else. Although Sebald never really tries to
pass himself off as another, he is constantly stepping in and out of other
people's shoes. At times he seems to inhabit others more easily than him–
self. The transitions between his own thoughts and others' are seamless,
and one gets the feeling that the W. G. Sebald that appears in his books is
only another of the writer's half-real, half-invented characters.
And invention is important. In the original title, Sebald inserts a delib–
erate break in the word
Schwindelgefuhle
(dizzy feeling), so that the
word
Schwindel,
which means lie, fraud, swindle, stands alone. The sig–
nificance of this sly pun should not be lost in translation. Sebald may
seem as earnest and unmeddling as a recording angel, but like someone
who keeps offering "irrefutable evidence" when one has not expressed
disbelief, he invites, even courts, suspicion. He insists, for example, that
a certain train ride left no trace on his memory, and then recounts it in
almost comically extravagant detail. In the section of the book that fol–
lows Stendhal (whom Sebald calls by his real name, Marie Henri Beyle),
Sebald drops another hint: "There is reason to suspect that Mme Gher–
ardi, whose life could easily furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one
point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence." He
further adds that it is unclear when Beyle took his journey to Lake
Garda, "always supposing that he made it at all." The unfocused and
deliberately amateurish photographs shroud the events in mystery. The
copies of documents, such as passport pictures or official papers, are
sometimes inked out in crucial places. He refers to the town he grew up
in only by the initial W, and are we really to believe that when he returns
for the first time to the house of his childhood and discovers, in what
must be one of the finest examples of the
unheimlich,
that it has been
turned into an inn, that he, without blinking an eye, checks in? But
though Sebald invites us to cast doubt, to continually wonder what is
truth or fiction, his narratives are so tightly wrought and confirmed by
so many echoes that they are impossible to unravel. Try to locate some
palpable truth and you will discover that when you reach for it it turns
to dust, like the sleeve of the uniform of an Austrian
chasseur
when
Sebald touches it. But if he confuses the boundaries between truth and
fiction, past and present, memory and reality, it is not to suggest that
boundaries don't exist: they do, only not where you might expect them.
On the very last pages of
Vertigo,
he casually wonders why no one is ever
