![]() ![]() Vertigo, first published in German in 1990 and English in 1999 (translation by Hulse) opens with a biography of a Marie-Henri Beyle, the real name of the French realist writer Stendhal. ![]() With long, winding sentences and reported speech, it is written (and translated into English by the revered Anthea Bell) with a poetry and sensitivity that earn Sebald’s prose adjectives such as meditative, dreamlike and contemplative. In other hands, this might have been a straightforward quest story, but Sebald does things differently, subtly, creating a page-turner despite long passages where very little seems to happen. ![]() It is a period that memory has erased, and uncovering the rest of his history – his parents’ fates, his birthplace, his mother tongue – requires careful excavation. Photograph: Vintage The page-turnerĪusterlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an academic who has an epiphany in a waiting room at London’s Liverpool Street station, recognising this as the place in which he first arrived in Britain as a small boy, travelling on the Kindertransport. ![]()
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