An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys across Europe -- to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and then Kafka, the narrator draws the reader line by line into a dizzying web of history, memories, and coincidences. Sebald weaves together teetery lines of literature, biography, and autobiography; slanted travelogs and legends; and -- most perilously -- memories. Everywhere, he plucks the string of the unreliability of memory: "what it is that undoes a writer."