Szplug's Reviews > Vertigo

It's interesting for me—as I reacquaint myself with the frequencies of the Sebald-via-Hulse literary signal—to contrast the prose styles of the late German and the modern French academic Mathias Énard, the author of the five-hundred-plus page shotgun blast Zone : whereas Énard's amphetaminic, propulsive narration piles one gruesome event upon another with such energized and relentless urgency that no single scene is given the opportunity to overwhelm or paralyze the reader with horror, but rather blends and merges into a chiaroscuro of violence that swells in Döppler fashion as the conclusion approaches, Sebald slows the pace to a steady crawl, a languid and leisurely stroll through memory's arcade, taking time over and again to pause before a particular reminiscence—and its temporal residues—in order to fully absorb the vibrations emanating from its anamnestic position.

It seems to me that each of Sebald's books represent the author working through his own collection of memories and reminiscences and, in individuating particular scenes, assaying to determine the degree of truth constituted within—and bemusedly lending free rein to the myriad brushes wielded by his imagination in filling in whatever gaps exist, easily crossing the ever hazy borders between fiction and (relational) fact—and fluidly intermingling unusual incidents from the lives and writings of historic personages whose physical and/or textual beings once occupied and performed amidst the same physical spaces where Herr Sebald places himself in the course of unfolding his eerily calm, episodic memory games—in order to flavor a recollection to better suit the memorial meal he is creating. Is the Sebald who narrates the books the same as the individual of the identical name who penned them? Does the placid shell splintered with cracks form the outer layer of both? How much does fiction abut, overlay, and obliterate the actuality of the past as remembered by the author? Could even he have stated the amounts with certainty before his untimely passing? It's a fascinating game we are privy to here, especially in that our own arranging of the past will influence that which the writer has put on paper for us to ingest and absorb; and the spicing provided by the shimmering drama enacted throughout his literary and historic borrowings finds the nodal points of similarity in perspectives unvaryingly alienated and chafed by the ebb and flow of the uncanny and unusual scenarios that life configures and bestows upon the human soul during the course of its journey in earthly incarnation—creating a framework of pond ripples that effortlessly sync with the perspective of any reader who has stood raw and bemused before the impenetrable mystery of his own life. That the eerie dissonances and asynchronous disturbances the author encounters when a reminiscence is invoked by a particular configuration of material and temporal settings and intersections—and visually represented or inspired by the strange and haunting collection of colorless photographic way stations liberally sprinkled about the book, pictorial lodestars guiding, succoring, and tethering the reader at select points along the textual voyage—can be understood and evaluated in coevality by a large proportion of his readers—whatever their age, sex, or nationality—is a testament to the German's ability to perceive the universal inherent within the uncanny interactions of the past and the present upon unique individuals, and to access it through the subdued and temperate working of his words.

Such is the manner in which Sebald's writing subtly but palpably work upon the reader's emotions. I feel uneasy under the spell of his toneless inflection, infected with a piercing melancholy for all that has passed into shadow and will never again bloom strong and fulsome against the noonday sun; the brief passages about the squalid, boarded up, serrated roof tenement building standing like a rotted tooth in the Viennese jaw, or the ghostly flour factory dourly frowning upon the cluster of cluttered Italian renaissance in the Venetian lagoon, give me a peculiar shiver when I read them, exposing a nerve to some powerful current of existential angst, unearthing a deeply buried spiritual cavity where the life has been excavated in a manner similar to that of the natural world shattered and shifted and shaped to allow the imposition of our temporary temples to our tool-worshipping, technocultural, self-incarnated pantheon. Even when the story veers into a visit to Sebald's childhood home, the village of W. cradled at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, the characters and events recollected by the discomfited prodigal son are those of eccentricities, madnesses, depressions, and madcap antics that lead furiously towards an abyss eagerly anticipated as a release from the numbing inanity of the present. It is telling that the few intimations of human sexuality are those which have been either deeply repressed or proven of an ephemerality and futility, and that—in either case—have left their subject distressed and wounded; when Sebald recalls a heated tryst he witnessed whilst still a boy, the woman bent backwards and receiving the urgent thrusts seems more dead than alive, with eyes of a glassy mania that recall those of the crazed horses that have frightened the author for as long as he can remember. The novel's final sentence describes a London visited by a silent rain of ashes—it serves as an exquisitely apt summary of the contents of Vertigo: nature's cyclical bounty of the contents of tombs, the temporary structure of a temporal life that is perpetually being forgotten or altered even as it occurs.

Fritz Leiber once wrote about how he found a decrepit alleyway in the urban midnight, with its silent spray of wires, pipes, shuttered windows and peeling façades, far more terrifying than castles or forests or the roiling seas, and it has stuck with me ever since. Sebald not only agrees with Leiber, he works these fears upon the wheel of memory to spin his uniquely disquieting marriage of the inanimate with the animate, the lifeless with the lived, the crumbling with the dead; a macabre and elegiac epic theatre that in its prime seemed conceived and written by a brilliant and daring virtuoso, but with the passing of the years has progressively revealed itself as the disturbing and decayed vision of a madman. Few other writers can so casually-yet-masterfully access the angst inherent within the transient nature of humanity—its life and its works—as set against the conception of forward-moving time as this enigmatic German genius.