Judith Schalansky

A dazzling cabinet of curiosities from one of Europe's most acclaimed and inventive writers. 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

An Inventory of Losses

taylor miles hopkins

"It seems to be one of the characteristics of western man that defies rational understanding that he prizes the lost more highly than the existing.”

All manner of strategies are used to keep hold of the past and ward off oblivion…Being alive means experiencing loss.

To forget everything is bad, certainly. Worse still is to forget nothing. After all, knowledge can only be gained by forgetting. If everything is stored indiscriminately, as it is in electronic data memories, it loses its meaning and becomes a disorderly mass of useless information.

Fundamentally, every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction, and the true of the work of all those disciplines and institutions that claim to be preserving the legacy of humanity…the archives…are nothing more than managed cemeteries whose stored specimens, as often as not, have been plucked from the life cycle of the present to be filed away, allowed to be forgotten even…

What we do not know cannot weigh us down, we might think.

In a sense, the world is a sprawling archive of itself…

By writing, as by reading, one can pick one's own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage.

This book, like all others, springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, to call to mind the torgotten, to give voice to the silenced, and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced.

Almost nothing stokes fear as surely as having won power over an enemy to whom one still feels inferior despite the victory.

For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the trurh

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