Read Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) Online
Authors: W.G. Sebald
Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Campo Santo
“Brilliant … bursting with flavors … at once precise and luscious … [
Campo Santo
] reminds us what a significant loss [Sebald’s] early passing was to the literary world.… [The] travel essays on Corsica are absolute gems.… [D]iscussions of Nabokov, Kafka, Günter Grass, and the schizophrenic poet Herbeck … provide a satisfaction as rare as a perfect meal.”
—
The Boston Globe
“[A] darkly companionable voice … This magnificent writer may have left abruptly, but his own shadow lingers.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Max Sebald has begun to be widely recognized as one of the most important prose writers of the past 20 years.”
—
The Economist
“Nuanced … multidimensional … Ruminative and elegiac, the late W. G. Sebald wove threads of timelessness connecting past and present.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“All of Sebald’s books are about journeys … [and he] is an entertaining guide.”
—
The New York Review of Books
“Sebald exemplified the best kind of cosmopolitan literary intelligence—humane, digressive, deeply erudite, unassuming and tinged with melancholy.… His themes are … marked by the seriousness of middle age. Yet Sebald’s spirit remains that of a philosophical gypsy.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“[Sebald] is prone to visions, hallucinations, and premonitions, usually induced by a confrontation with a personal memory or a historical site. These are the source of the subdued horror of much of Sebald’s work, and also of its very dry humor.… Four fragments of a literary work about a trip to Corsica … have the virtues of Sebald’s best work, with its odd blend of fiction, memoir, history, and travelogue.”
—The New York Sun
“Stunning … intensely observant, erudite, lyrical, and provocative … Detailed descriptions of Sebald’s wanderings on [Corsica] turn into musings of astonishing beauty and insight into history, environmental decimation, and our feelings about death. These arresting meditations, brilliant syntheses of thought and feeling, are followed by masterful, passionate critical essays expressing Sebald’s belief in the healing power of literature and our obligation to remember the past and respect life in all its wonders and mysteries
—Booklist
“[A] masterful translation … Sebald was a beautiful and intelligent writer.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“If you thought literary modernism was dead, guess again. The spirit of such masters as Kafka and Borges lives on in the [work] of W. G. Sebald.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
2006
Modern Library Trade Paperback Edition
Translation copyright © 2005 by Anthea Bell
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
and the T
ORCHBEARER
Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This edition was published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.
Published in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton, a publishing division of Penguin Books Ltd., in 2005.
This work was originally published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag, München, in 2003. Copyright © 2003 by The Estate of W. G. Sebald. Copyright © 2003 Carl Hanser München Wien. This English language translation by Anthea Bell is published here by arrangement with Hamish Hamilton, a publishing division of Penguin Books Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sebald, Winfried Georg
[Campo Santo. English]
Campo Santo/W. G. Sebald;
translated by Anthea Bell.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-43303-9
I. Bell, Anthea. II. Title.
PT2681.E18C36 2005
834′.914
—dc22 2004050311
v3.1
Campo Santo
is a collection of prose by W. G. Sebald, who died in a road accident on December 14, 2001. His novel
Austerlitz
had been published shortly before, and Sebald had not yet begun working on a new book since finishing it. However, there was a work that was never finished: in the middle of the 1990s, after the publication of
The Rings of Saturn
(1995), Sebald began writing a book about Corsica, but then set it aside and turned to writing essays and working on
Austerlitz
. Parts of this Corsica project were published from 1996 onward as separate texts, in various places; Sebald also used a long section in 2000 as a text for his acceptance speech on the occasion of the award of the Düsseldorf Heine Prize. These texts are collected together for the first time and arranged, in the order of their composition, in the opening section of the present volume: “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” (“In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica”), “Campo Santo” (“My first walk the day after my arrival in Piana”), “The Alps in the Sea” (“Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest”), and finally the miniature
“La cour de l’ancienne école.”
Together, the four Corsican texts, each self-contained, make up admittedly only an incomplete spectrum, which cannot show exactly what the abandoned book would have been like; however, collecting the separate parts makes them appear in a new light, and they also cast light on each other. Sebald’s literary estate, which has not yet been studied and edited, contains no other recent literary works. The Corsican project is the last and unfinished work of a writer’s life that came to a premature end.