Campo Santo - Hardcover

Sebald, W. G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241142776 ISBN 13: 9780241142776

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2005

Synopsis

When W. G. (Max) Sebald died tragically in a road accident in December in 2001, a unique voice was silenced. Here, however, is a collection of the pieces he left behind, none of them previously published in book form.

At the heart of this volume are four lyrical and meditative prose fragments from a great, still incomplete work that he was planning, centring on the island of Corsica. The title piece, discovered only after his death, takes a Corsican graveyard as Sebald's starting-point for his musings on cemeteries, natural history, ghosts, anthropology, and the tenuous barrier between life and death.

The literary essays making up the rest of the book touch upon great writers with whom Sebald felt a particular affinity, such as Nabokov, Kafka, Günter Grass and Bruce Chatwin.

As always, Sebald is haunted by the past history of his native Germany. To read the book is, as one American critic has put it, to step 'into the quirky treasure-house of his mind' and see his perceptive gaze bent on the subjects and writers that fascinated him. It is a fitting memorial to an author who himself studied the shifting nature of memory and time with such sensitivity.

About this title

Product Description:

Campo Santo

Review:

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

A writer whose work [belongs] on the high shelf alongside that of Kafka, Borges and Proust. --The New York Times Book Review

Far outdoing even the best of these pieces are three set in Corsica. Perhaps intended as part of a new work of imagination, they compel a startled delight, and they compel painful regret outrage even that Sebald is gone and unable to continue. --Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0241142776
• ISBN 13: 9780241142776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240