An Inventory of Losses
Judith Schalansky, trans. By Jackie Smith
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
An Inventory of Losses
Judith Schalansky, trans. By Jackie Smith
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Today’s sheltered-in-place readers will be thrilled to encounter a writer who believes that physical attendance isn’t always necessary for true engagement.
There are a couple of starts to this collection of 12 stories. A brilliant preamble that has much in common with Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces details things that disappeared — and others that were discovered — while the author was working on this book.
The book is a collection of twelve pieces, each sixteen pages long, which take as their theme something that has been irretrievably lost and survives only in legend, part, or echo. Schalansky’s gaze traverses a wide span of history, surveying subjects from the poetry of Sappho or the ruins of a once-splendid Roman villa to the dismantled debating chamber of an obsolete regime or the faded beauty of the aging Greta Garbo. In rich, evocative, precise prose—beautifully translated from the German by Jackie Smith—Schalansky recalls these lost things and meditates on their destruction, all the while interrogating the extent to which memory—or writing—can compensate for material loss.
... a spell-binding meditation on the instinctive desire of humans to preserve everything despite the fact that everything will inevitably be lost.
The first page forms a kind of prose poem. On one side, a list of things destroyed or disappeared during the making of the book, from a space probe swallowed up by Saturn’s atmosphere to the last mosaic-tailed rat. Overleaf is another list, of discoveries made in the same period.
Ranging from lost islands and extinct species to the lost poems of Sappho, the incinerated scribblings of an eccentric and the lost biography of an amateur astronomer, An Inventory of Losses uses the fine detail of what no longer is to explore the world of what might have been.
Personal, ironic, and self-consciously researching, Schalansky’s stories stage the author’s own process of investigation, and the fears and desires behind it. In doing so, An Inventory of Losses mingles the indulgence of curiosity with a subtle internal critique of dominant European habits of knowledge production about the world and its past.
This is the author at her most magisterial; her stately prose in this case mirroring a river’s unhurried course. (The translation from the German by Jackie Smith, here as throughout, is a triumph of subtle accuracy.) But Ms. Schalansky is also a wry, laconic and occasionally self-mocking explorer who gives the disarming impression of being astonished at times by her own conclusions.
... stunning.
... a collection of beautifully constructed stories about objects that have not survived the test of time.
... inspired.