This is early Sebald, though already fully recognisable: hybrid prose that moves between travel narrative, memoir, fiction, history, photographs, and archival disturbance until all of them begin to infect one another.

The four pieces orbit Stendhal, Kafka, Italy, exile, memory, and the strange mechanics of perception itself. Rather than offering plot in the ordinary sense, Vertigo accumulates unease, coincidence, place, and historical afterimage. It’s a book about movement that somehow keeps turning into haunting.

Vertigo is one of the books where his whole method becomes visible: the grainy inserted images, the drift between documented and imagined material, the sense that European history is always rising through the floorboards.

For readers who like him, this is foundational. For readers new to him, it is slightly more oblique than The Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, but still very much a real shelf title.

A first edition, ex-library copy (as seen by sticker), clean inside. In near fine condition.