VERTIGO

Name: VERTIGO
Author: W.G. Sebald
ISBN: 0-8112-1430-3

by W.G. Sebald & translated by Michael Hulse ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2000

For all its mystery and profundity, there's also much self-absorption in this traveler's tale, and its tone must be overcome...

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The predecessor to Sebald's two acclaimed novels of history, memory, and melancholy—The Rings of Saturn (1998) and The Emigrants (1996)—is a lesser, more autobiographical work, yet it moves in elegant, unanticipated ways across time, the landscapes of Europe, and into the depths of human experience.

Starting with images of a young Stendhal in northern Italy, on the march with Napoleon as a teenager and later in the throes of a romance that was to fire his literary imagination, the narrator shifts abruptly to 1980 and a disconcerting trip to Vienna, Venice, and Verona, where his persistent unease gives way to full-fledged terror that sends him scrambling home to England. Determined to repeat the trip, in 1987, he has Kafka in mind as he nears Verona: K. had arrived there in 1913 in a state of mental distress and taken a cure at nearby Riva. Bypassing Verona to follow in K.'s footsteps, the narrator is sidetracked and winds up at a hotel, writing obsessively—whereupon his passport is stolen, he's nearly mugged, and he's in such a state that he no longer remembers where he is. When he does, he finally returns to Verona to complete his research, then decides to visit the Alpine village in southern Germany where he lived as a boy just after WWII and which he has not seen since. Awash in a flood of memories, anchored only by an old man who knew him well, he remembers the man's family, the blond barmaid he was fond of, the forester who died in a suspicious fall, and his bout with diphtheria. As winter comes he returns to England, bringing along the ghosts of his past.

For all its mystery and profundity, there's also much self-absorption in this traveler's tale, and its tone must be overcome occasionally to appreciate where the story is going.

Pub Date: May 31, 2000

ISBN: 0-8112-1430-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by W.G. Sebald & translated by Anthea Bell

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ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION
by W.G. Sebald & translated by Anthea Bell

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.