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An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is our guide on a hair-raising journey across Europe and into the past. Vertigo is a book in four parts. The opening section is devoted to Stendhal's memories of joining Napoleon's army as a very young man just when it invaded Italy. The second section centers on Casanova's horrible imprisonment in Venice. The third part follows Kafka's tribulations in Italy; and the fourth part chronicles, in an intensely moving fashion, Sebald's own return to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. Everywhere he encounters self-alienation and the unreliability of memory: "what it is that undoes a writer."