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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Great Enigma: History in Snapshots and Elegies, May 13, 2005
This review is from: Campo Santo (Hardcover)
WG Sebald whose too early accidental death in 2001 is a much-lamented loss to the literary world he so quietly entered briefly before his demise. He is a unique writer, one whose style includes ramblings and crude snapshots of incidental places that support his strange tales. For many he is an acquired taste and only time will tell whether his honored books will withstand the test of immortality. And that fact is very much in keeping with the worldview of this enormously gifted observer of the human condition and the plight of the individual played against the backdrop of history and melancholy.
CAMPO SANTO is not a completely successful book in the manner of this highly praised novels. But the very fact that his early departure from the writing stream impacted readers to the point of wanting more justifies this aggregation of four chapters of a novel based on Corsica and multiple lectures and essays and addresses. The book opens with a fine essay by editor Sven Meyer, a timetable that introduces Sebald to readers unfamiliar with his odd life. The subsequent works are translated from the German by Sebald's longtime translator Anthea Bell. And that fact introduces one of the many odd quirks in Sebald's career: why should a man who spent the better part of his expatriation from his native Germany teaching in England write in German instead of his adopted language English?
Perhaps one reason lies in the focus of each of Sebald's works. His stories are travels and meanderings through various locations that serve as his platform for posing the question of history as memory, the unresolved restitution of Germany after WW II (a period he only knew from seeing the disastrous postwar results and reading the reflective works of other writers coping with the crossfire of guilt and sadness/remorse and anger - he was born in 1944), an the driving need to understand the role of mankind in the flux of a globe at unrest.
Reading the first four chapters of CAMPO SANTO makes us wish he had completed this novel about Corsica and the fascination with the life of Napoleon who was born there. But the saved fragments of this novel interrupted by his award-winning AUSTERLITZ are savory and contain many eloquent passages to assuage the reader longing for more.
The remaining essays and lectures are dense and more cerebral but for those Sebald addicts there is much to digest about his thoughts and philosophy. And for those readers especially this final book is a must for the library. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, May 05
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Man learns from disasters as much as a lab rabbit from biology, May 19, 2008
In other words, concludes this paraphrase of Brecht, that Sebald includes in the text on the lack of German literature on the bombing of German cities, survival of mankind would be purely accidental.
Sebald was a thorough pessimist. This book is a posthumous collection of travel texts on Corsica and literary essays, mostly on German language writers, but also on Chatwin (who could hardly have been German, thinks Sebald) and Nabokov (who most decidedly wasn't either, though his categorical statement that he did not learn German in 15 years living in Berlin has been doubted).
For me, the two key texts in the collection are Campo Santo and the one about the description of destruction. In addition there are essays on Handke's Kaspar Hauser (maybe you know Herzog's movie about this odd story; Handke is not my favorite writer, nor Herzog my favorite film maker; frankly speaking Sebald had little to say about them either); on Grass's and Hildesheimer's look back on the 3rd Reich; on Peter Weiss, the man who brought the Auschwitz trials to the stage (incidentally my selected writer for my Abitur exam, centuries ago); on Jean Amery, a victim; on Kafka with a nice little piece on his trip to Paris incl. an unappetizing visit to a bordello; on Nabokov, who explored the darkness on both ends of our lives and who saw butterflies as a subspecies of ghosts.
Campo Santo, the text that gave its title to the collection, is about the history and sociology of funerals in Corsica, with reference to the anthropological literature of the globe, and its lore of death and ghosts on this island, where Christianity has a hard time against the challenge of traditional superstitions. On a global scale, the megalopolis has no space for keeping the dead intact, they must move to cyberspace.
The main literary essay covers the strange fact that there was very little descriptive literature covering the destruction of German cities by bombing raids. Sole exception in the early years was Nossack's Untergang. What was written was generally drowned in mythical ruminations, as if the language of the fascist code had invaded the secret style of the 'inner emigration' and made it involuntarily identical. The debris of destruction are buried under the debris of a ruined culture. In the early years after the war, there was also no enquiry into the reason of the destruction; it was accepted like a destiny, a final judgment. However, more and more the blanket bombing of German cities during WW2 is seen as having been useless for the final victory, as useless as the blanket bombing of Vietnam later on.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Posthumous Collection of Prose and Critical Essays, February 7, 2010
This review is from: Campo Santo (Hardcover)
After discovering W. G. Sebald last year by way of his melancholy and powerful book 'The Emigrants', I had planned to read 'Rings of Saturn' next - that is until I found a copy of 'Campo Santo' in the bargain bin of another site. I ordered it on name recognition only, not knowing it was a posthumous collection of both critical essays and fragments of another novel begun around the same time that 'Saturn' was published. As such, I would not recommend 'Santo' to someone new to Sebald, and even those who already appreciate his work may feel ambivalent about this collection.
The trouble I've found with books like these, gathered together after the author's death, is that either the editor, through his selection and collating process, is too intrusive, or else we get everything but the kitchen sink - excerpts that the author may very well have wished to keep out of the spotlight are brought out for scrutiny. Fortunately, 'Campo Santo' suffers from neither of these problems - for one thing, these separate essays have already been published in one form or another (though perhaps not in English). Another positive note is that the editor, Sven Meyer, makes no effort to impose his image of Sebald onto the reader by manipulating the ordering of the essays, as they are presented chronologically; and though we have to take on faith his choices for inclusion in this volume, it was my impression that his criteria was simply that they have not been collected in book form before.
The book is divided into two section; Prose and Essays. The first consists of four chapters, complete in themselves, in which Sebald writes of a trip to Corsica, and which were evidently to be part of another major work, but instead were laid aside as he started working on 'Austerlitz'. This section alone is well worth the price I paid. There is something about Sebald's polished work that is comforting - although not emotionally so, as the accumulated layers of implication in his work can sometimes be very dis-comforting. It is the comfort of following a sure mind at work, one that does not rely on cheap thrills or vulgar surprises with which to string the reader along. Although his peripatetic, wandering style of writing will probably only appeal to a small group - it requires attention and a prolonged denial of gratification - Sebald achieves a sort of delayed effect with it. Images, phrases and elicited emotional states from his work resurface periodically to slightly alter and to heighten the initial response. At least, this is how I felt after 'The Emigrants', and although the overall outcome is muted with the smaller sample, I sensed that same effect after the short prose pieces of 'Campo Santo'. Part history, part travelogue, and part rumination, they share that calm matter-of-factness, that inundation of detail that marked Sebald's earlier novel (if novel is even the right term).
The 'Essays' section attempts to illustrate the evolution of Sebald's critical side, with the first few examples extremely dry and academic, and the last few characteristic of the writing style with which I was already familiar. I felt these initial essays weighed down the entire book, and although the themes are intriguing, from the little I know of his later work, I believe Sebald returns to these ideas in a manner that is much easier to consume. These topics include the responsibilities (and failures) of German literature in the war's aftermath, and questions of how individuals integrate their senses and the world around us, as encapsulated, for example, by the story of Kaspar Hauser. These treatments are not poorly written, but are so ponderous and exhausting, especially in comparison to his other writing, that they were difficult for me to read through.
The book ends with a quick look at Jan Peter Tripp, Bruce Chatwin, some private ruminations and an acceptance speech to the Collegium of the German Academy - all of which are excellent, and, in the case of Chatwin, encourage me to explore further. Other topics include Kafka, the poet Ernst Herbeck, and Nabokov - fine for what they are, but not indicative of Sebald's later capability. Enthusiasts of W. G. Sebald will certainly find much that's interesting in 'Campo Santo', and those who have not enjoyed his writing in the past will probably see little to change their mind. For those who are looking at him for the first time, I would suggest skipping this one for now and beginning where I did, with 'The Emigrants'.
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