'Vertigo' by W.G. Sebald

Addressing (however indirectly or even ironically) loss, exile and insufficiency in a world composed entirely of residues (lingering or fading, or unstable and even strangely malleable), Sebald’s patient and melancholy prose, not fiction nor autobiography nor travelogue nor essay (but perhaps something more than all of these), is unlike much else: it is as if he is edging his way around ripples still moving outwards from past events that are unregraspable and unapproachable, often too awful to be more than circumambulated, charting for us the patterns of interference that occur when these ripples meet the ripples from other events or are disturbed by wholly submerged cultural or personal traumas.

(May 2013)