Matthew Ted's Reviews > Vertigo

93rd book of 2020.

Sebald traverses no land known to us. The names are familiar (Vienna, Venice, Verona…) but he is, in actuality, traversing his own mental landscape. We glimpse into it, the thin thread that weaves, not only across Europe, but his mind. Thoughts and images which appear to have no correlation begin to connect. A sense of order can be seen through chaos. Through reading we begin to also question what the blurb questions: What could possibly connect Stendhal’s unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsman and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona?

We are led, by a firm, but frail hand through four parts: “Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet,” “All’estero,” “Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva,” and “Il ritorno in patria.” The first, Stendhal’s hurting heart. The second, a European romp, Kafkaesque, frightening, cities that remind one of The Unconsoled; the third part gives us Kafka’s disatisifaction and finally, our narrator returning to his hometown of W. – reminiscent of another European narrator remembering Combray…

Above all, we are connected to this story, which is connected to itself, by a feeling of vertigo. A word which gives us the lurch, the plummeting of one’s stomach, but also fear. Waking on the edge of the bed, falling through the ether of sleep, with the bedsheets scrunched in our fists. But Sebald’s mental landscape also allows us to traverse our own, to consider the bizarre connections in our life. The album Noonday Dream (which conjures its own images too: the fortress in Nazarére, Marlboro cigarettes, tired seascapes...) reminds me of the meandering roads from Château-Verdun to Lagrasse, a journey that has faded to just the rushing of poplar trees from the car windows, the fields of rape seeds, the mountains. And once in Lagrasse, the square in the centre of the commune, where one finds shade, a woman selling pottery – water jugs patterned with flowers, birds in flight – and where, my mind’s eye placed the man and his cat from Camus’ The Plague. My father and I watched the water, we spoke about living there, writing, drinking wine and eating figs. Sebald’s narrator believes he is being followed in “All’estero,” his passport is misplaced, he asks the parents of two boys if they would send photographs of them to his home after their holiday for he is baffled by their resemblance to Franz Kafka, but they presume him a kind of paedophile, and he retreats. The image of these Kafka boys become the true Kafka, feeling ill, depressed; where at times, he sits like a ghost at table, suffers bouts of claustrophobia, and imagines that every fleeting glance sees right through him.


L'Orbieu River, Lagrasse - Photo by Me.

It rains here today as it has rained many times before, in many different towns. My mind has not settled since finishing Sebald. I am thinking again about vertigo; it is not the sense of falling, not exactly, that haunts the narrative, but the sense of unease, or disquiet. The lost passport, the sinking feeling one can imagine at realises their passport has been taken by someone else by mistake. The feeling one can imagine of seeing the same two men watching them in Venice as in Vienna. Twisting, foreign cities. Travel allows us to enter another version of ourselves: we become more open, possibly more happy, more curious, more grateful. The narrator gives a great deal of insight into travel, the following of which struck me as so true, so hilariously astute, that I underlined it twice: I do not know how I go about choosing the restaurants where I eat in unfamiliar cities. On the one hand I am too fastidious and wander the streets broad and narrow for hours on end before I make up my mind; on the other hand I generally finish up turning in simply anywhere, and then, in dreary surroundings and with a sense of discontent, select some dish that does not in the least appeal. On my second trip to Rome, last year, with a girl I no longer know, we did the exact same thing. It was our final night in the city and we wandered for over an hour, passing countless lovely restaurants thinking we will find one better. Soon enough we were bickering, hot, foot-sore, tired. We had been sightseeing all day anyway, and were now defeated. Without realising it, we had almost made it back to our hotel, where it was rather residential and all the restaurants that gathered around the tourist locations were gone. In the end we settled for a café-restaurant a single road over from our hotel. The menu didn’t appeal to us, and the food was poor. I kept saying to her over my meal, “It’s homely food, isn’t it? It’s nice homely Italian food.” Which I said by way of apology. She didn’t enjoy the meal and nor did I. And yet, we had passed so many good restaurants. The owner was beefy and dour-faced, and watched us suspiciously the whole time we were eating. We were the only customers. The whole experience was one we could have done with avoiding, especially on our last night in the city. Walking away from the restaurant I felt something close to vertigo, disappoint, distaste, disquiet. But the charm of Rome hadn’t failed me till then, walking the historic streets, returning again to the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and, in the Vatican, staring into the eyes of Augustus.


Augustus in the Vatican - Photo by Me.

If only, I think, I could write these memories as Sebald does. As I have said before, his prose is haunting. He speaks, all at once, as a friend, and as a terrifying ghost-like figure, ethereal, omniscient…

He floats through memories, he drifts over borderlines.