An Inventory of Losses
WINNER OF THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
**Winner of the WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION and the HELEN AND KURT WOLFF TRANSLATION PRIZE**
**Winner of the Society of Authors' FIRST TRANSLATION AWARD**
**Longlisted for the INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE**
"A fine example of everyone's favourite genre: the genre-defying book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and finished with a jeweller's eye for detail" JOHN SELF, Guardian
"As we deal with the consequences, emotional and material, of a pandemic, it is hard to imagine a better guide to the resources of hope than Schalansky's deeply engaging inventory" MICHAEL CRONIN, Irish Times
"Weaving fiction, autobiography and history, this sumptuous collection of texts offers meditations on the diverse phenomena of decomposition and destruction" Financial Times "Books of the Year"
"Pure gold storytelling" SJON
Judith Schalansky's strange and wonderful new book, recalling writers as different as W.G. Sebald and Christa Wolf, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, sees her return to the territory she explored so successfully with her best-selling Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, which Robert MacFarlane called "utterly exquisite" (Guardian) and about which Time Out's reviewer said "Rarely has armchair travel been so farflung and romantic".
Judith Schalansky is a wholly original writer whose books articulate perfectly what she wishes to say. Each of the pieces, following the conventions of a different genre, considers something that is irretrievably lost to the world, including the paradisal pacific island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger, the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, and the former East Germany's Palace of the Republic.
As a child of the former East Germany, it's not surprising that the dominant emotion in Schalansky's work should be "loss" and its aftermath, but what is extraordinary is the thoroughly engaging mixture of intellectual curiosity, down-to-earth grasp of life's pitiless vitality, ironic humour, stylistic elegance and intensity of feeling that combine to make this book a masterpiece and one of the most original and beautifully designed books to be published in 2020.
Translated from the German by Jackie Smith
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schalansky's inspired latest (after Atlas of Remote Islands) melds history, memoir, and fiction into something new and extraordinary: a museum of the extinct, the missing, and the forgotten. Chronicled in 12 short pieces, each based on a "lost" object among them an early-20th-century film, fragments of Sappho's poetry, destroyed Italian villas, demolished East German government buildings the narratives are distinct, memorable, and, at their best, spellbinding. Some are highly researched, meticulously reconstructing historical places such as the the Villa Sacchetti at Castelfusano in Rome and figures such as 18th-century British explorer James Cook, who, in search of a then-mythical southern continent, "had ploughed the southern seas in huge, sweeping zigzags and discovered nothing but mountains of ice." Other tales take on the flavor of impressionistic, contemporary memoirs, rooted in the narrative of a Schalansky-like writer-researcher as she explores the topic at hand. Still others have the feel of speculative fiction, so detailed in their histories that they feel like memories. In one, wild animals are brought to fight one another before the massive audiences of Rome; another follows the moments, both dramatic and mundane, of a day in the life of an East German couple. With this collection of illuminating meditations on fact and fiction, Schalansky cements her reputation as a peerless chronicler of the fabulous, the faraway, and the forgotten.
