As a reader, W. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones.
Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs. Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz , and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo.
I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.
Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon. I could write it or its like. Here you go:. Here, at last, do we have something out of place β an iceberg in Corsica.
Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter.
