How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.
—W. G. Sebald, Vertigo

Travel, Kierkegaard claimed, is the best way to avoid despair. But for the German writer W. G. Sebald, it leads, as often as not, from one state of despair to another. In his first novel, Vertigo (1990),¹ translated two years ago, Sebald’s lightly fictionalized alter ego explains that “In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a country which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life.” Yet without his routines of work in his garden or with his books, he finds himself at a loss. During ten days of compulsive walking, he is incapable of moving outside a precisely defined sickle-shaped area. The narrator begins hallucinating; he sees Dante walking ahead of him, then figures from his childhood. He escapes to Venice where, preoccupied by the “ever widening and contracting circles” of his thoughts, he is again temporarily incapacitated before fleeing to Verona, then on to Riva.

A similar, if not the same, narrator, in Sebald’s third novel, The Rings of Saturn(1995), seeks release through a journey. “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that