“Christina Campo was an anchorite with worldly manners [and] the face of a fifteenth-century Tuscan statue. She lived amid contradictions, between hope and despair, passion and scorn, gentleness and rage. She had a sovereign sense of limits and frontiers, but her soul was immoderate. She longed for the unknown homeland, the God hidden behind the visible gods.” —Pietro Citati
“Campo’s language, steeped overlong in ritual, comes on like a sibyl’s breath….I imagine you could spend a lifetime with Campo’s work and never get to the bottom of her devotion to fairy tales.” —Bailey Trela, The Baffler
“Campo was an obscure essayist who translated a few books, wrote introductions to a few more, and composed a small number of poems; yet she may have been, in her way, a genuine prophet. Indeed, it seems possible that, despite her miniature scale of production, she could be the greatest writer in any language of the entire postwar period. Certainly she is one of the only ones who bears comparison with writers like Blaise Pascal and Giacomo Leopardi, whose literary and philosophical work was a matter of survival, to help them endure chronic illness, and come to terms with the mysteries of suffering.” —Jaspreet Singh Boparai, The Lamp Magazine
“Eschewing the Romantic idolisation of the imagination, Campo argues that fairy tales are the surest guides to reality, the paths on which we travel to the real…It was because she was dedicated to the pursuit of sprezzatura in her life, as well as in her writing, that she was able to find a joyful way of being in the world, and that she was able to stand back—though never aloof—from the controversies of her day to produce the numinous prose we are now so fortunate to have in an English translation.” —Roy Peachy, European Conservative
“Campo’s creativity was a vocation in the truest sense; always at a remove, indifferent to attention or success….Perfection was her theme, aesthetic as well as moral.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
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