Campo Santo

by Anthea Bell (Translator), Anthea Bell (Translator), W. G. Sebald (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $13.25

  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, Gunter 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.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $5.92

  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 .

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $11.55

  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 .