Vertigo

Description:

"An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is our guide on a hair-raising journey across Europe and into the past. Vertigo is a book in four parts. The opening section is devoted to Stendhal's memories of joining Napoleon's army as a very young man just when it invaded Italy. The second section centers on Casanova's horrible imprisonment in Venice. The third part follows Kafka's tribulations in Italy; and the fourth part chronicles, in an intensely moving fashion, Sebald's own return to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. Everywhere he encounters self-alienation and the unreliability of memory: "what it is that undoes a writer.""--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Fiction,  Memory,  German Autobiographical fiction,  Translations into English,  Alienation (Social psychology),  European Authors,  Fiction, general,  Europe, fiction,  Fiction, biographical

People: Franz Kafka (1883-1924),  Stendhal (1783-1842)