W. G. Sebald exemplified the best kind of cosmopolitan literary intelligencehumane, digressive, deeply erudite, unassuming and tinged with melancholy. . . . In [Campo Santo] Sebald reveals his distinctive tone, as his winding sentences gradually mingle together curiosity and plangency, learning and self-revelation. . . . [Readers will] be rewarded with unexpected illuminations.The Washington Post Book WorldThis final collection of essays by W. G. Sebald offers profound ruminations on many themes common to his workthe power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the presence of ghosts in places and artifacts. Some of these pieces pay tribute to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present, examining, among other things, the islands formative effect on its most famous citizen, Napoleon. In others, Sebald examines how the works of Gnter Grass and Heinrich Bll reveal the grave and lasting deformities in the emotional lives of postwar Germans; how Kafka echoes Sebalds own interest in spirit presences among mortal beings; and how literature can be an attempt at restitution for the injustices of the real world.Dazzling in its erudition, accessible in its deep emotion, Campo Santo confirms Sebalds status as one of the great modern writers who divined and expressed the invisible connections that determine our lives.From the Trade Paperback edition.