An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky, Jackie Smith (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229647
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/21/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	21 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in 1980, lives in Berlin and works as a writer, book designer, and editor (of the prestigious natural history list at Matthes und Seitz). Her books, including the international bestseller Atlas of Remote Islands and the novel The Giraffe’s Neck, have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Jackie Smith is a literary translator working from German and French into English. After graduating from Cambridge University she worked as a commercial translator before dedicating herself full-time to creative and book translations. In 2015 she was selected to participate in the New Books in German ‘Emerging Translators Programme’. Her translation of an excerpt from Hans Platzgumer’s novel Am Rand (On the Edge) won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize 2017.

Editorial Reviews

There are essays of wry wisdom...Jackie Smith’s translation shimmers, various as the damselflies.— 4Columns

It is hard to imagine a better guide to the resources of hope than Schalansky’s deeply engaging inventory.— Michael Cronin - Irish Times

Twelve fictional essays comprise this stunning work depicting animals, places, objects, and buildings that are lost forever... Not to be read quickly but savored and contemplated.— Library Journal (starred)

Schalansky treats each of the 12 objects cataloged in her new book with an almost religious awe, like a believer giving herself up to be inhabited by spirits.— Los Angeles Review of Books

Brilliant....an ambulatory and often playful meditation on history and forgetting.— Kate Zambreno - New York Times

Schalansky cements her reputation as a peerless chronicler of the fabulous, the faraway, and the forgotten.— Publishers Weekly (starred)

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.— Francesa Wade - The Baffler

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 - The Guardian

In each case Schalansky has alighted on fascinating material, and her delicately poetic turn of phrase is evident on every page.— The Telegraph

Instead of a requiem for what is gone, Schalansky sings a dirge for what remains.— The White Review

The translation from the German by Jackie Smith…is a triumph of subtle accuracy.— Wall Street Journal

An exploration of extinct animals and objects told through dazzling stories that question the bounds of memory and myth.— Kirkus (starred)

The most wondrous

book of the year: by taking the vanished and turning it into a great piece of

literature, the author has performed a magical act.— Die Zeit

A celebration of what can still be accomplished with imagination, paper. and ink.— Anthony Doerr

Exquisite. Like the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À Rebours, who sets off for London from Paris but realizes he need go no further than the Gare du Nord, Schalansky decides to make a virtue of absence.— Robert Macfarlane

Utterly fascinating.— Rosmarie Waldrop

Disappearance may be a forlorn theme, but it has rarely been granted such reverent contemplation, or been made to feel so powerfully tangible.— Sam Sacks - Best Books of 2021 - Wall Street Journal

Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses and Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory are both trying to pin down echoes and build from dust.— Audrey Wollen - Best Books of 2021 - Bookforum

From the Publisher

★ 2020-03-29
Objects, animals, and places that no longer exist, except in our collective imagination.

Schalansky’s fifth book is a collection of beautifully constructed stories about objects that have not survived the test of time. “Being alive means experiencing loss,” Schalansky writes, and the world has experienced much loss. Animals, people, and places that once existed are now only memories due to inevitable decay, colonialism, the cleansing of records, and natural disasters. While in Schalansky’s previous book, Atlas of Remote Islands(2010), she wrote of remote havens that remain difficult to reach even with modern travel, here she depicts the animals, people, and places that are only known through what details have been recorded or remembered. From fragments of Sappho’s poems to a submerged South Pacific island, from the extinct Caspian tiger to the lost films of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Schalansky brings us to the fantastical worlds of gladiator rings in ancient Rome, the ruins of a 19th-century German palace, and the surface of the moon. Tying the stories together are Schalansky’s evocative, precise descriptions and the sense of wonder in confronting the sheer immensity of what has been lost. “The world...only grieves for what it knows,” she writes. Schalansky documents her chosen objects with utmost care while relying on myth as she moves beyond what we know for fact to what we might imagine. “For myth is the highest of all realities and...the library the true theater of world events.” Schalansky’s meticulously researched stories are poignant reminders of the extent of our impact on the natural world and a call to honor the animals, objects, and places that, due to our own negligence, have ceased to exist.

An exploration of extinct animals and objects told through dazzling stories that question the bounds of memory and myth.

Kirkus Reviews