Book review: ‘Campo Santo’ by W. G. Sebald

Campo Santo is a posthumously published collection of previously unpublished writing by the wonderfully enigmatic writer W.G. Sebald.

I have long given up trying to describe Sebald’s writing, which I very much admire. Like other commentators, I usually end up falling back on the only appropriate, somewhat unhelpful adjective Sebaldian.

If you enjoy Selbald’s other books, you’ll certainly love this one. It includes a number of chapters from what seems to have been an abandoned book on Sardinia, an exploration of the difficulties of writing about human catastrophes, and his thoughts on various writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Kasack, and Bruce Chatwin.