<em>Vertigo</em>, W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald-the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness-takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels <em>The Emigrants</em> and <em>The Rings of Saturn</em>. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts-Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as <em>The New York Times Book Review</em> declared about <em>The Emigrants</em>, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."