Campo Santo

Description

Sebald's final collection of essays provides 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 Guenter Grass, Bruce Chatwin and Kafka, 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.

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 1966 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, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.

"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 "Brilliant . . . rollicking, sorrowful . . . [a] wonderfully mellifluous translation." -The Boston Globe