It was an eccentric pastime that no one knew about

… I just pottered away and produced these bits.

Vertigo came about by chance. I bought Stendhal's De l'amour in a bookshop in Lausanne. It resonated with a great many things that were on my mind because it contained many Italian place names which were familiar to me from the trips I'd made to Italy as a child. I knew Kafka's works well, but not Stendhal's, and yet I was immediately struck by a remarkable convergence. Stendhal was born in 1783, Kafka in 1883. Stendhal stayed in northern Italy in 1813, Kafka in 1913. So then I wrote two literary-biographical essays on the two authors whom I wanted to bring closer together. While I was doing that writing, I remembered that I, too, had travelled through northern Italy in 1980. I wrote an account of that trip in the long story All'estero, which ended up as a part of a triptych in between the stories about Stendhal and Kafka. That is how the book structured itself. In the fourth and final part, Il ritorno in patria, I recalled my childhood in the little village of Wertach. It is an attempt on my part to shed light on an emotional propensity of which I became extremely conscious for the first time when I experienced it in the late 1970s: the crisis that besets you in midlife. I wanted to know where it came from. I wrote the final part as a search for my own ‘I’. (SM 350)