[In the following review, Dirda notes the critical acclaim Sebald has gathered, but finds Vertigo tenuously constructed and confusing for readers who do not enjoy Sebald's pessimistic European sensibility.]

Children's literature, it has been rashly said (by me), can be divided into two subgenres: the books that kids like (Animorphs, the American Girl series) and those that grown-ups like (various Newbery and Caldecott winners). As it happens, one can make a comparable judgment about adult fiction. There are novels that readers love, and there are texts, fictions, experiments that critics rave about.

Vertigo falls into this latter category. I enjoyed it and admired it immensely, but then my suspect taste for all kinds of narrative, from the most popular to the most innovative, could easily give the word catholic a bad name. W. G. Sebald is extremely—how shall I say it?—European and this, the first of his memoir-novels, demands a liking for digressive travel writing and somber reminiscence.

But consider a few facts. Susan Sontag, no less, called Sebald's The Emigrants (first published in German in 1993, here in English in 1996) “an astonishing masterpiece: it seems perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read.” That volume collects narratives, augmented by old photographs, about four mid-century exiles, touches on World War II and the Holocaust and, like all of this German professor's work, apparently merges truth and fiction. Even better, perhaps, The Rings of Saturn (German 1995, English version 1998) chronicles a walking tour of East Anglia, meditates on the 17th-century essayist Thomas Browne and Joseph Conrad, among other writers, and discloses the kind of appealing melancholy that fellow melancholiacs find well-nigh irresistible. It opens: “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” By the way, for admirable sentences like that we must thank not only Sebald but also his superb translator, Michael Hulse.

I'd wanted to write about The Rings of Saturn—by the bottom of page 1, Sebald is so depressed that he is at first virtually immobile and then hospitalized: what could be more irresistible?—yet for some forgotten reason didn't. When advanced proofs of Vertigo (first published in German in 1990) appeared, I thought “Aha! Any book that opens with 30 pages about the young Henri Beyle (the novelist Stendhal's real name) has found its reviewer.” In this opening section Sebald provides a potted summary of Beyle's passion for Italy and his concomitant erotic attachments, including a description of his ingenious theory of crystallization (the inevitable process by which a lover finds beauty in every aspect of his often quite ordinary mistress). Sebald also emphasizes Beyle's various illnesses, “his sleeplessness, his giddiness, the roaring in his ears, his palpitating pulse.” This vertigo, the result of drugs taken for syphilis, leads to the novelist's early death from sudden heart failure in his fifties. Beyle once observed that it was all right to die in the street, so long as one didn't do so deliberately.

From this tone-setting preamble, Sebald launches into the 100-page account, titled “All'estero,” of a journey to Vienna and Italy in which he hoped “that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.” En route, the author suffers delusions, visits a man who has spent most of his life in an insane asylum, discusses the paintings of Pisanello, imagines that people are out to kill him, recounts Casanova's famous escape from a Venetian prison (The Leads), loses his passport, and works steadily away at his writing. Here the mood often recalls Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge—wistful, hallucinatory, essayistic, lyrical. “Before us lay the fading lustre of our world, at which we never tire of looking, as though it were a celestial city.” “I saw the hospital island of La Grazia with its circular panoptic building, from the windows of which thousands of madmen were waving, as though they were aboard a great ship sailing away.” Sebald is even humorous: After fighting his way through a crowded rail-station restaurant, he manages to pick up his order. “My cappuccino was served, and for a moment I felt that having achieved this distinction constituted the supreme victory of my life.”

Following this long chapter, Vertigo then proffers another evocative shorter piece about Franz Kafka's visit to Verona, ending with allusions to that master's great short story “The Hunter Gracchus.” There are Kafkaesque observations—“We lie prostrate, on the boards, dying our whole lives long”; “life nonetheless always goes on, somehow or other”—and echoes of early sections of this very book: a reference to Stendhal, the image of a dead body borne by two men.

In Vertigo's last section, “II ritorno in patria,” Sebald revisits his natal village, relates the lives of his old neighbors, reflects on a provincial, artist's obsession for painting woodcutters, and concludes with a highly charged account of a mysterious death. In the possible murder of Schlag the hunter, Sebald mingles Stendhalian passion (the quiet hunter and the barmaid), Kafka's Gracchus story, his own vision of a dead man on a stretcher, and various Proustian observations:

“The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.”

Some of these family stories, whether normal, absurd or appalling, recall Thomas Hardy-like tales in miniature. Take the unsuccessful Dr. Rambousek: “It was no surprise that this short, corpulent man, who was always dressed like a man about town, was unable to gain a foothold in W. His melancholy and foreign-seeming features, perhaps best described as Levantine, the way his lids were always lowered over his large, dark eyes, and his entire somehow distant demeanour, left little doubt that he was one of those who are born to lead inconsolable lives.” Notice the lovely dying fall of those last dozen words.

But how does all this stuff hang together? And why does Sebald end by mentioning The Seas of Bohemia, a book “not listed in any bibliography, in any catalogue, or indeed anywhere at all,” followed by a vision of the Great Fire of London? I don't really know. The mood throughout is appealing—here is truly the October Country—and one can spot weak links among the various narratives without feeling that they really bind the book together. Instead, one is left with an autumnal prose poem, a mesmerizing voice in the European twilight.

For me, that's more than enough. Some of us identify with the troubled, wistful, and disappointed. But readers of a sunnier disposition may simply shrug with impatience and wonder, “What's all this about?” Or even murmur, “Where's the plot?” As for the many historical photographs and illustrations scattered through these pages, are they in fact evocative historical bits of evidence, or grainy pictures without any aura whatsoever? They certainly reinforce the feeling of memoir—but why then do the publishers dub the work a novel? How much is actually fiction? Maybe it's best simply to accept the book as yet a third haunting masterpiece from W. G. Sebald. So many tantalizing questions, and no clear answers. It's enough to give you vertigo.