In one of his insomniac ramblings, he sees the poet Dante disappear around a corner and has his first attack of vertigo. He sees an uncanny resemblance to Franz Kafka in twin boys he meets on a bus. Next he's in a Verona library researching newspapers from September 1913. Like the narrator, he lies on his bed, arms crossed under his head, unable to sleep and seeing strange forms in the play of streetlights on the ceiling. The chapter ends with the death of Kafka's friend, who is transformed into the mythical figure of Gracchus the huntsman.
Nothing makes sense.
The narrator puts pieces next to each other and can't find any coherence, only odd coincidences and unexplainable doublings and repetitions of people and events. Near the end, his voice is more desperate. Sebald has created the bitter counterpart to the German Romantic ideal of the poet as wanderer, communing with nature and the gentle souls he meets as he ambles through sublime landscapes. Like a luminous ribbon, it had stretched out before one even on a starless night. This is a quest novel, but in a wary, suspicious mode.