W.G. Sebald's 'Campo Santo' Published in French

Actes Sud has released 'Campo Santo', a French collection of W.G. Sebald's previously unpublished writings. The volume includes four narratives—'Campo Santo', 'Petite excursion à Ajaccio', 'Les Alpes dans la mer', and 'La cour de l'ancienne école'—originally intended for an unfinished natural and cultural history of Corsica. Sebald weaves together memory, local customs, and the role of the dead, drawing on literary references such as Kafka's 1911 diary entry about Napoleon's tomb and Flaubert's descriptions of Corsica. The second part gathers fourteen essays from 1975 to 2001, addressing topics like the literary representation of German city destruction during WWII, Günter Grass and impossible mourning, Peter Handke's play 'Gaspard', and Jean Améry's writings on Nazi victims. Sebald, who lived in Norwich, England from 1966, blends documentary and fiction through authentic yet mysterious photographs, creating what he calls 'fictionnel realism'. The collection explores themes of destruction, mourning, and memory, forming an archaeology of memory populated by spectral figures.