W. G. Sebald
Campo Santo
Praise for Campo Santo
Editorial note
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.
