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Tuesday 2 December 2008

A master shrouded by mist

The opening piece, ‘A Little Excursion to Ajaccio’, describes, in Sebald’s usual charming fashion, a visit paid on an idle whim to the Napoleon museum, where the slightest relic of the Emperor is preserved and the elderly attendants all look like members of the Bonaparte family. Towards the end of the piece, Sebald branches out into his familiar descant upon the transience of things. Neither of Napoleon’s parents, he says, ‘can of course have dreamed that the children at the dining table with them daily would eventually rise to the ranks of kings and queens, or that the time would come when the most hot-tempered of them …. would wear the crown of a vast empire extending over almost the whole of Europe’. No indeed. In the next sentence, equally typically, Sebald shifts from this local rumination to the universal: ‘But what can we know in advance of the course of history, which unfolds according to some logically indecipherable law, impelled forward, often changing direction at the crucial moment, by tiny imponderable events?’ etc, etc.

Now this might simply be Sebald on an off day. Such thoughts are liable to swim into one’s head on a hot Corsican afternoon, not to be recognised, then or alas later, as thoughts that other people have thought roughly a million times before.

But then take the next piece, the title essay ‘Campo Santo’. Sebald wanders through an abandoned graveyard. What does he notice? ‘Another striking feature of the design of the Piana graveyard … was the fact that in general the dead were buried in clans, so that the Ceccaldi lay beside the Ceccaldi and the Quilichini beside the Quilichini.’ Once we have recovered from this startling observation, which could be replicated in almost any cemetery anywhere, he moves on to note that the better-off corpses in Piana have larger tombs with pediments and sarcophagi, while the poorest have only a metal cross stuck in the bare earth. Well, now, there’s a thing.

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