Synopses & Reviews
W. G. Sebald exemplified the best kind of cosmopolitan literary intelligence-humane, digressive, deeply erudite, unassuming and tinged with melancholy. . . . In Campo Santo] Sebald reveals his distinctive tone, as his winding sentences gradually mingle together curiosity and plangency, learning and self-revelation. . . . Readers will] be rewarded with unexpected illuminations.
-The Washington Post Book World
This final collection of essays by W. G. Sebald offers profound ruminations on many themes common to his work-the power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the presence of ghosts in places and artifacts. Some of these pieces pay tribute to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present, examining, among other things, the island's formative effect on its most famous citizen, Napoleon. In others, Sebald examines how the works of Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll reveal the grave and lasting deformities in the emotional lives of postwar Germans; how Kafka echoes Sebald's own interest in spirit presences among mortal beings; and how literature can be an attempt at restitution for the injustices of the real world.
Dazzling in its erudition, accessible in its deep emotion, Campo Santo confirms Sebald's status as one of the great modern writers who divined and expressed the invisible connections that determine our lives.
Synopsis
Campo Santo is a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald When W.G. Sebald died tragically in 2001 a unique voice was silenced. Campo Santo is a collection of the pieces he left behind - none of them previously published in book form - which provide a powerful insight into the themes that came to dominate his life. Four pieces pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present. Sebald also examines the works of writers such as Kafka, Nabokov, and Gunter Grass, showing both how literature can provide restitution for the injustices of the world and how such literature came to have so great an influence on him. Campo Santo is a fitting memorial to W.G. Sebald, who himself studied the shifting nature of memory and time with such sensitivity. 'A precious addition to the canon' Independent 'Will come to be seen as indispensable to an understanding of his work' Sunday Times 'Full of a sense of liberation and lightness ... these pieces] abound in energy and work the authentic Sebaldian magic' Literary Review 'We have become suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in Sebald's case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is, the real thing' John Banville, Guardian 'Sebald was probably the greatest intellect and voice of the late twentieth century' Anthony Beevor, The Times 'A writer whose explorations of time and memory make him arguably the closest author modern European letters has to rival Borges' Sunday Times W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, For Years Now and A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.