An Inventory of Losses
Author | : Judith Schalansky |
Publisher | : New Directions Publishing |
Total Pages | : 250 |
Release | : 2021-12-21 |
ISBN-10 | : 9780811229647 |
ISBN-13 | : 0811229645 |
Rating | : 4/5 (47 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote Islands A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Winner of the Warwick Prize Winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize Longlisted for the International Booker Prize Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.