Vertigo

“Memory, the insidious gnawing of memory, which so often seems to destroy what it seeks to preserve.”

Beyle, or Love is a Madness

The book opens with an exploration of the life of French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal. The narrator recounts Beyle’s experiences in Italy, particularly his obsessive love for Mathilde Dembowski and his struggles with identity and memory. The section blends biography with Sebald’s signature meditative style, drawing parallels between Beyle’s emotional turmoil and the narrator’s own sense of dislocation.

All’estero

The second section follows the narrator’s travels through Italy, where he reflects on historical figures such as Casanova and Kafka. The journey becomes a fragmented meditation on exile, loss, and the unreliability of memory. The narrator’s encounters with ruins, forgotten places, and fleeting strangers evoke a sense of melancholy and impermanence.

Dr. K. Takes the Waters at Riva

This section reimagines Franz Kafka’s 1913 trip to Italy, blending fact and fiction. The narrator reconstructs Kafka’s journey with dreamlike precision, focusing on his anxieties, illnesses, and fleeting moments of clarity. The prose mirrors Kafka’s own existential unease, emphasizing themes of alienation and the search for meaning in an indifferent world.

Il ritorno in patria

The final section returns to the narrator’s own past, recounting a visit to his childhood village in Germany. Memories of post-war Europe, family history, and personal disorientation intertwine. The journey becomes a confrontation with time’s erasure, as the narrator grapples with the ghosts of history and the fragility of human recollection.

Key Ideas

• The unreliability of memory and its haunting persistence.
• Exploration of exile, displacement, and the search for identity.
• The interplay between biography, fiction, and autobiography.
• Melancholic reflections on time, decay, and historical trauma.
• The blurred boundaries between reality and imagination.