Eight of the 12 essays, which range from scholarly studies to acceptance speeches, explicitly relate to his literary interests: postwar German literature, Kafka, Nabokov, even Bruce Chatwin. If there is a “side” of Sebald that Campo Santo does reveal-a side that will be new to much of his English and American audience-it is the writer as reader.

From an anecdote of a disease-ridden village to a contemplation of the mackerel, each piece in this book closely adheres to Sebald’s fundamental obsession: how to live under the shadows cast by the cataclysmic events of World War II, European imperialism, environmental destruction-”the marks of pain,” as he put it in Austerlitz, “which … trace countless fine lines through history.” His overarching literary project remained constant, regardless of what form he chose. The collection was assembled and arranged by the literary scholar Sven Meyer (he goes inexplicably uncredited in the English version), who presents it in two sections: “prose” and “essays.” Despite the overlap between these two categories, Meyer takes pains to distinguish them: The first section includes four brief literary texts intended for a book about Corsica, while the second grouping, he writes in his introduction, “illustrates Sebald’s other side, as essayist and critic.” But the revelation of Campo Santo is that Sebald did not have two sides. And now his final work has arrived: Campo Santo, a miscellany of pieces from Sebald’s archive. The following year brought On the Natural History of Destruction, the English version of a 1999 series of lectures in which Sebald argued that German writers had neglected their duty by failing to document the destruction of Germany’s cities during World War II by the Allied air war it provoked a debate over the legitimacy of asserting the suffering of the German people that has yet to be resolved. First, in 2002, came After Nature, a book-length prose poem that represents Sebald’s first foray into creative writing (it appeared in German in 1989). He published only four major literary works in English during his lifetime (there were also several books of scholarly essays, none of which has yet appeared in English), but his posthumous publishing career has nearly doubled that figure. 2001, Sebald’s presence continues to make itself felt in surprising new ways. So it seems appropriate that even now, more than three years after his sudden death in Dec.

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