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Loading... Vertigo (original 1995; edition 2001)by W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (Translator)
Work InformationVertigo by W. G. Sebald (1995)
German Literature (75) 20th Century Literature (499) Books Read in 2020 (1,210) » 1 more 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (535) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Stendhal e Kafka, ma anche Pisanello e Giotto. Questi i compagni dei viaggi - reali, immaginati, ricostruiti - qui descritti da Sebald, in peregrinazioni incentrate soprattutto sull'Italia e sull'inseguimento di un senso di vertigine che dà il titolo al libro, suo primo romanzo e già capolavoro. Fra le quattro parti del libro, All'estero è quella che prediligo, per via dell'affascinante equilibrio fra progetto e imprevisto, non senza momenti di ironia.
The time has come to say something about this writer's extraordinary prose, without which his rambling plots and ruminations would be merely clever and unsettling. Like the coincidences he speaks of, it is a style that recovers, devours, and displaces the past. He has Bernhard's love of the alarming superlative, the tendency to describe states of the most devastating confusion with great precision and control. But the touch is much lighter than Bernhard's, the instrument more flexible. Kafka is present here too, perhaps from time to time Robert Walser, and no doubt others as well. But all these predecessors have been completely digested, destroyed, and remade in Sebald and above all in his magnificent descriptions, which mediate so effectively between casual incident and grand reflection.
Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of this compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. 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? No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)833.914Literature German literature and literatures of related languages German fiction Modern period (1900-) 1900-1990 1945-1990LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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A young imitator of Sebald, who retains his description of the flight of birds suspended in air for eternity, and a felicity for fin-de-siècle authors suffering from, alternatingly, homosexuality and venereal disease; though we know Kafka not to have been so somber and Stendhal so maudlin. ( )