Campo Santo - Softcover

Sebald, W G

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141017864 ISBN 13: 9780141017860

Publisher: Penguin UK, 2006

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 Günter 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 Allgäu, 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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

In this final collection of sixteen essays by W. G. Sebald, one of the most elegant and incisive authors of our time, all of his trademark themes are contained-the power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the presence of ghosts in places and artifacts.
Four pieces pay tribute to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present. In "A Little Excursion to Ajaccio," Sebald visits the birthplace of Napoleon and muses on the hints in his childhood home of a great man's future. Inspired by an Italian cemetery, "Campo Santo" is a reverie on death, ranging from the ambiguity of inscriptions to the size of and adornment of gravestones to the blood-soaked legend of Saint Julien.
Sebald also 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 place beside Proust and Nabokov, great writers who perceive the invisible connections that determine our lives.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author:

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted, Campo Santo and Silent Catastrophes among other publications.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin UK
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0141017864
• ISBN 13: 9780141017860
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240