VERTIGO (First UK edition - first impression - wrappers issue)

W. G. Sebald (Translated from the German by Michael Hulse)

ISBN 10: 1860466249 / ISBN 13: 9781860466243

Edité par The Harvill Press, London, 1999

A propos de cet article

First impression of the first UK edition with full number-string sequence including the no. "1": 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 on the printer's page. This paperback edition was published simultaneously with a scarcer hardback edition. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. Illustrated with black and white photographs throughout the text. ***Very good in monochrome photo-illustrated card covers with integral folding French flaps, with silver titles to the spine and front cover. There are some light creases to the edges, mainly on the back cover, but the covers are clean and only lightly marked. No major creases or tears, and no reading creases to the spine. Corners sharp. No reading lean to the binding. Spine tight. There is a light abrasion to the bottom of the fore-edge of the page block, and some creasing and marking to the bottom corner of the last few pages (please see scans). No inscriptions. Apart from the aforementioned creasing and marking to the last few pages, the interior pages are clean and bright. No tears. ***210mm x150mm. 263 pages. ***Contents: I. Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet, II. All'estero, III. Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva, IV. Il ritorno in patria. ***'"Vertigo" is the book in which W. G. Sebald first employed the spell-binding blend of personal narrative, investigation, fiction, history and ravel writing that has since won him international acclaim for "The Emigrants" and "The Rings of Saturn". ***In the first of four linked narratives following the young Stendhal (at that time still Marie Henri Beyle) as he revisits the battlefields of Napoleon's Italian Campaign, Sebald announces his theme: the vertiginous unreliability of memory. In the second and third narratives, the frescoes of Pisanello, the imprisonment of Casanova in Venice, the trials of Franz Kafka in Italy, and the narrator's own uneasy journeyings, develop the theme. In the final movement, motifs sketched in the earlier parts of the book are synthesised into one mesmerising autobiographical quest as Sebald returns to his childhood roots in southern Germany to discover the dizzying otherness of his own past. ***Line by line we are drawn into a symphonic labyrinth from which escape seems impossible, until Sebald introduces his final theme: the delight the creative process takes in blending, transforming and refashioning past experience into a new and consoling whole.' (Quote taken from the front flap) ***First impression of the first UK edition of W. G. Sebald's "Vertigo", published as a paperback original (simultaneously with a scarcer hardback edition). A good reading copy of the original printing of this Sebald classic. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

N° de réf. du vendeur PB720

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: VERTIGO (First UK edition - first impression - wrappers issue)
• Éditeur: The Harvill Press, London
• Date de parution: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 1860466249
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781860466243
• Reliure: Original Wraps
• Édition: First UK Paperback Edition
• État de l'article: Very Good
• État de la jaquette: No Jacket, as Issued
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Collectable Paperbacks
  • First Editions
  • Literature in Translation

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

At moments when reality shows itself to be unstable or uncanny, we experience a form of vertigo. This is further complicated when we try to transform experience into writing, and fact clashes with memory. Vertigo explores this theme through four stories and four journeys. With Stendhal we travel through the unreliable and painful recollections of an inglorious military career. With Kafka we travel to Italy and an unsuccessful bid to regain physical and mental well-being. Through these journeys and two by the unnamed narrator one to Bavaria to revisit the places shaped by childhood memories - Sebald examines the unreliability of memory, the intensity of childhood experience and the dizzying unknowability of the past. Using Sebald s own mixture of personal narrative, investigation, report, quotation (both textual and pictorial) and meditation, Vertigo is a wonderful journey into the human mind and its methods of mediating reality and the past.

Revue de presse

"Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed" (Anita Brookner Spectator)

"Where has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and precision, so direct in its expression of feeling, yet so respectfully devoted to "the real"?" (Susan Sontag Times Literary Supplement)

"Possessed of a richness and strangeness that would put most other writers to shame. Sebald's journey into himself and his past is compelling, puzzling, unique" (The Times)

"As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell.it works triumphantly well. The fact that W.G. Sebald chooses to tease, dazzle and mystify should not blind us to the fact that he does the one thing that every novelist should do: he entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires" (Robert McCrum Observer)