Details
Synopsis
The last writings of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) are collected here. While it is infinitely sad to think that there will be no more, this volume is a treasure of Sebaldian meditations on his usual eclectic variety of subjects, including Nabokov, Kafka, Günter Grass, depictions in literature of Kaspar Hauser the wild child, and Sebald's own childhood in postwar Germany. An entire section, entitled "Prose" (as opposed to "Essays," the book's other section), is devoted to Sebald's musings on the island of Corsica.
| Size | | Length: | 221 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 12.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Sebald was a polymath whose hybrid narratives link him with such resisters of fixed classification as Borges, Calvino,the antiquarian Robert Burton, and Guy Davenport....[I]t's good to have these further products of his life-affirming imagination and spirit."
Kirkus (01/01/2005)
"Sebald as reader, like Sebald as writer, homes in utterly unselfconsciously on the aspects of these writers that interest him most, often to the total disregard of anything else about their work. Though Sebald taught literature at the University of East Anglia for 30 years, his anxiety about academic life betrays itself in his charming yet highly untraditional criticism, which is much more deeply influenced by his personal obsessions than by trends in literary scholarship. Even the essays here that adhere most strictly to scholarly conventions--several first appeared in academic journals--are typically meandering almost in defiance of their academic trappings....'There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship.' Campo Santo demonstrates that the boundary between the two is more permeable than even Sebald thought. In whatever he wrote, from a completely realized work of fiction to the briefest book review, he found a way of achieving his moral imperative.
Slate - Ruth Franklin (03/14/2005)
"In [the] later essays, [Sebald] doesn't so much analyze his subjects--Kafka, Nabokov, Bruce Chatwin--as accompany them, turning them into Sebald characters: melancholy men living in a real or metaphorical exile, haunted by the past and the inevitability of their own dissolution."
New York Times Book Review - Jennifer Schuessler (04/03/2005)
"It is not easy to assess a book such as this, appearing as it does through the mist of grief and reverence surrounding the sudden and far too early death of a great writer....[I]t is so moving to hear his voice again that at first it hardly matters what he is saying....This is not, I think the book with which someone unfamiliar with Sebald should start reading him (I would suggest THE EMIGRANTS for that). But no one who loves his writing could bear to be without it."
Literary Review - Diana Athill (04/01/2005)
"The four pieces about Corsica, ranging from two to nineteen pages, are grouped together at the beginning of the volume and give a hint of what might have evolved into a significant addition to Sebald's canon. For all their brevity, there are moments when these Corsican pages reach toward a newfound interest in lives and situations different from the author's familiar repertoire....The setting inspires the writer to passages of brilliantly observed, rhythmically and tonally alert prose...."
New Republic - Michael Andre Bernstein (07/25/2005)
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