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Tuesday 2 December 2008

A master shrouded by mist

Then — and this too is typical — Sebald does produce some genuinely fascinating material about Corsican burial customs. This material is drawn from his UEA colleague Stephen Wilson’s study of 19th-century Corsican feuds. Until quite recently, it seems, most Corsicans shunned public cemeteries and buried their dead on their own land in an olive grove or under a chestnut tree so that the dead might continue to watch over their property. Looking back at other essays in, for example, The Rings of Saturn, one cannot help noticing the same phenomenon: the relative ordinariness of Sebald’s own observations which are then tricked out by his magpie’s gift of picking up brilliant insights and anecdotes from other writers.

Sebald also deploys, too often for comfort, the device of linking together odds and ends about famous people in order to impart an air of imaginative profundity. In one piece here, he describes going to bed during a thunderstorm and dreaming of how, when Verdi was dying, the people of Milan put down straw outside his house to muffle the sound of horses’ hooves. Then the storm outside his window makes him think of a thunderstorm that Wittgenstein saw as a boy of six from the balcony of his family’s summer home. Neither of these fragments of memory is doing any real work. Putting down straw in order not to disturb the dying was common practice over most of Europe at the time and it being Verdi who is dying contributes nothing, just as there is no extra philosophic depth added to the passage by it being the boy Wittgenstein who saw the storm. This is celebrity tourism dressed up as literature.

In the literary essays collected in Campo Santo, Sebald’s gift for quotation becomes a generous and unassuming trait. He is able to show us the best of Nabokov, for, example, the wonderful image from Speak, Memory of the author’s father being tossed up in the air as an act of homage from his grateful peasantry.

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