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Campo Santo
by W.G. Sebald
This posthumous release collects sixteen essays by the German-born Sebald, which range from literary criticism to travelogues.
Random House, 240 pages
03/01/2005
$24.95
ISBN: 1400062292
Nonfiction
Essays
Literary Criticism
Travel
NOTES:
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell.
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Boston Globe Roland Merullo
A brilliant if somewhat uneven book... Slim but dense, Campo Santo reaches the reader as a sort of small sandwich bursting with flavors.
San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman
The 16 prose pieces and essays presented in Campo Santo offer a compelling overview of the development of many of the central themes that would emerge from Sebald's novels.
Slate Ruth Franklin
The pieces assembled here are often astonishing, sometimes puzzling, and occasionally inscrutable, but taken together they offer an entirely new perspective on one of contemporary literature's finest minds.
Washington Post Michael Dirda
Sebald's spirit remains that of a philosophical gypsy: His various books look back at holidays spent wandering among the fens and moorlands of England, prowling the junkshops of London and Manchester, lingering in Paris train stations and Dutch museums.
The Independent Carole Angier
But to anyone who already loves Sebald's mysterious circling around his themes, the four slim chapters of his unfinished book will be a precious addition to the canon.
New York Review Of Books Charles Simic
What gives his books their drama is their inner turmoil and the unexplained origins of his grief. Sebald was torn between mysticism and history. He was a Romantic who kept being haunted by the reality of the world. I expect there will be a protracted, probably never-ending debate over whether the seeming arbitrariness and mysteriousness of some of his work can be justified. Meanwhile his books, starting with "The Emigrants," are very much worth reading.
Kirkus Reviews
[Sebald] analyzes literary efforts to justify, explain away, or condemn Germany's militarism in two superb analytical pieces.
Booklist Donna Seaman
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. [1 Feb 2005, p.931]
Library Journal Ali Houissa
It is indeed an eclectic mix of texts that deals with issues familiar to Sebald's wide readership: travel, identity, nature, exile, history, memory, and the Holocaust. [15 Feb 2005, p.130]
The Guardian Steven Poole
Best is the Corsica material, alternating sun-saturated walks with gloomy museum interiors; descriptions of the least promising material are exquisitely dramatised, and one is also reminded that Sebald could be very funny.
Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Their interest is uneven, perhaps, although most bear a touch here and there of the peculiar quicksilver of the writer's mind and style.
The Spectator Ferdinand Mount
What Sebald says is not untrue or ignoble or unfelt or not worth repeating. It is just that it is hard to detect much originality or creative energy there.
Daily Telegraph Ian Thomson
Unfortunately, Sebald's prose does not always translate well into English ("the diffuse pain of being unaware", "the unconscious perfection of his lost self"); no doubt German is better suited than English to expressing transcendental speculation.
The Economist
The essays are especially interesting in that they help to show a gradual loosening and release of Sebald's talent as a writer, a progression from strict footnoted argumentation to the almost recklessly fluid and digressive style that characterises his prose fiction.
Publishers Weekly
The essays, however, feel unfinished, lacking polish and structural integrity.
The New York Times Book Review Jennifer Schuessler
But unlike such offerings as ''After Nature'' and ''On the Natural History of Destruction,'' it is very much a miscellany, and an often frustrating one... What holds Sebald's completed works together -- the larger web of coincidence and correspondence that suggests the universe is both interconnected and frighteningly formless -- is missing.
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