Vertigo, Sebald's first major prose text, is also his most heterogeneous, its two lengthy quasi-autobiographical segments, ‘All'estero’ and ‘Il ritorno in patria’, alternating with short biographical sketches based on the diaries and letters of Stendhal and Kafka. The other of Sebald's works to consist of four independent narratives, The Emigrants, explicitly signals in its very title the characterological and thematic links between the four narratives, and the stories are also connected by narratological similarities involving structures of repression and the belated return of buried memories as a result of mediation by the narrator. The title Vertigo, on the other hand, is significantly less determinate, particularly in the German original – Schwindel.Gefühle – which denotes a sensation of dizziness while implying also the possibility of being duped, conned or deceived (though quite who the victim of this ‘swindle’ is meant to be is a question that the text leaves open).

The multiple indeterminacies of the title and the thematic heterogeneity of Vertigo go hand in hand with weak narrative cohesion. Even within the individual stories, the usual mechanisms of narrative – the posing and solving of enigmas that Roland Barthes (1970) terms the ‘hermeneutic code’ – are present only in greatly attenuated form, even in ‘All'estero’, which always promises to develop into a full-blown detective story but never does. Yet both within and between the stories there is a dense pattern of repeated motifs that lends the text as a whole a high degree of coherence.